Nokia’s Linux-based Tablet will be available in the USA this Thursday, a week after its European debut.

The imaginatively titled Internet Tablet is an unusual move for Nokia in a number of ways. Linux PDAs such as Sharp’s Zaurus haven’t shown much staying power on the market, and have in recent years been hard to find outside Japan.

Nokia is effectively launching a brand new PDA platform - its open source Maemo - that starts with zero applications against competition from PalmOS and PocketPC that can boast abundant software catalogs. As a hardware platform, the Tablet looks decidedly underpowered, with its smartphone OMAP chip from Texas Instruments no match for similarly priced StrongARM-powered competition. Expanding the Tablet is much more expensive than it should be, as it uses an expensive RS-MMC slot, and as a PDA, Nokia’s Tablet even lacks a built-in calendar.

In its favor, the Tablet is lighter than the competition and boasts a better screen, at 800×480 pixels.

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