Nokia's much-anticipated Linux-based Web tablet reportedly will not ship until later this year. Previously, Nokia said it would ship the 770 Internet Tablet in September. The tablet is the mobile phone marketshare leader's first consumer product based on Linux.

Sources at Nokia blamed the delay on a need to finalize the device's software environment, according to eWEEK.com. Given a recent announcement from the Minimo Project, it seems possible that licensing talks between Nokia and embedded browser vendor Opera may have broken down.

Prototypes of the 770 included Opera's embedded browser; however, the Minimo project, a community effort to build an embedded Web browser based on Mozilla, and rumored to be anonymously funded by Nokia, recently published an aggressive short-term roadmap culminating in a Dec. 22 release.

Unlike most small-form factor mobile devices, the Nokia 770 does not use a compact windowing environment such as Qtopia. Instead, it uses a pared down version of the same X window system used on desktop Linux machines, along with a special lightweight X window manager optimized for small screens. The 770's X-based Linux environment should in theory allow developers, and even advanced users, to easily port any of thousands of available open source graphical programs to the device. However, one early report, based on a prototype, found performance to be slow.

Despite its delayed launch, the 770 passed muster with the FCC at the beginning of September.

Nokia recently put another product — it's N91 “jukebox” phone — on hold until Q1, 2006, according to the eWEEK.com story, which can be found here.

Meanwhile, Archos's Linux and Qtopia-based PMA-400 continues to ship, and grow it's software ecosystem — theKompany.com announced in May it was porting its suite of commercial PDA apps, originally developed for the Sharp Zaurus, to the device.

Nokia announced the 770 in May of this year, and began courting GNOME developers with tablet discounts a short time later.

 
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