Disclosure: I worked, through a subcontractor, for Nokia from 2006 onwards.

According to the people who deviced [no pun intended] the 770, it was never meant to be a product. It came originally as an internal prototype / developer machine, to make ongoing evaluation and development for maemo platform and its common applications easier. Nokia was obviously planning a polished consumer tablet. Someone high up decided the investment in hardware and supply chains for a developer-only system was not financially sensible, but if it was a product that could be sold to cover at least some parts of the setup cost, that would change the picture. (Incidentally, I believe, but can not prove, that it was also to gauge interest in tablet devices in general and to lay the ground for the future Nxxx series market.)

Let's keep in mind, Nokia's consumer facing business was a PHONE company. We'll get back to that.

The first consumer grade Nokia tablet was the N800. I vividly remember fixing its media player UI and working around various set-in-stone roadblocks in the GTK+ middleware. I also remember how our entire team were on a crunch schedule to get the feature completeness and bug rates to an acceptable level for going gold. The launch date had been set. We actually were told a few weeks before the internal deadline to stop working on all changes: our latest weekly progress report showed we had passed the launch requirement and the PMs didn't want to risk regressions from otherwise benign bug fixes.

N800 had an FM radio. It had wireless internet and Bluetooth. It had a surprisingly functional front-facing video camera. It did not have phone capabilities. Neither did its upgrade, N810.

The N8xx devices were incredible pieces for what they did, at the time. Techies loved them. The rest of the world didn't. Nokia was a phone company, and consumers associated the brand with the ability to make and receive calls.

The first member of that family to have the missing capability was N900. Based on rumours and drunken vents in a sauna, the certification process to get that type of device with a baseband modem accepted was not a pleasant experience.

----

To this day, one of my proudest achievements in the maemo projects was to hunt down the root cause for a really nasty UI lag problem in the media player. Nokia was a design-heavy company, and someone in the design team had mandated a very specific type of GTK+ element to use in the problematic section of the player UI. The element did not support the necessary actions or properties, so in order to satisfy both the UI specification and the latency requirements, Nokia would have had to patch in a whole load of additional functionality to the element itself. This was a public API, and supporting that kind of bastardisation in a core library would have been an absolute nightmare.

This bug was present in the run-up to N800. It was still there for N810, and it got bounced to me because I had argued about the infeasibility before the N800 launch. Once I had laid out the full technical details of the root cause, with a list of possible ways to fix it and the associated costs of each, I got the most satisfying resolution:

"WONTFIX. We do not dare fix this bug."