Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Try telling that to the US customers :( where all the high end phones by Nokia are off contract.. anyways what I was talking about was nokia's attitude towards software upgrades based on their history.

Just look at the new competitors, the iphone. palm pre, android devices. They all do get upgrades, with obviously some features missing depending on hardware limitations.

best eg. is the iphone where the platform is supported over different hardware platforms.

I'm pretty sure nokia can easily afford to do it, the only problem is the lack of a monetary incentive to do it. But still will keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

I'm thinking there's another equally significant aspect: They've not had to do it before. They ship hundreds of phone models, get them out the door, move on, fix critical bugs perhaps, help networks to customise the firmware, maintain thousands of custom firmware instances. That's how it's been with non-Maemo handsets.

So they're probably not set up for long term support and ongoing development of a single handset. Many people working there won't be doing things that way. There's a whole tradition, habit, culture, working practices thing.

And they ship so many new models. Apple at least only has 3 iPhone models to support. That's quite different form Nokia's hundreds at any one time.

It'll be interesting to see if the Maemo group in Nokia manages to change this to be more like the Apple long term support model. Maybe they will, maybe they won't.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Nokia's problem will be that they will simply be outnumbered by Android in the upcoming years (their threat is Android, not Apple). Nokia's apparantly solution is QT compatibility across Symbian and Maemo. Thus applications written for one will ideally work on the other with little issue. Then push Symbian down so all dumbphones eventually becomes smartphones running Symbian while Maemo is for the high end devices. Whether that will work, who knows. My money is more on Android but they have their own issues to work out too. For example, running everything through a byte code interpreter means application compatibility, but it also means that you aren't taking full advantage of the hardware.

Apple's path will be interesting since they will eventually have to break compatibility support with the existing iPhone models. Whether they set up their development kit to say scale applications will be interesting to see.

It'll be interesting to see where everyone is in the future. I wonder if it'll turn out like my prediction with Android having the dominant marketshare for phones, with Apple's iPhone and Maemo in its own markets (similar to how Apple has its own selective marketshare in PCs).

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Correct. But what worked then.. wont necessarily work now. Plus I really don't think that we'll be seeing the same number of device variations like we currently see with s60 handsets.

Breaking off product support eventually is fine. But the current timeline nokia has is a wee bit short.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

@Anthrobug, you should know better that just because the hardware is the at the same level doesn't mean the software has to be. After all I am sure Nokia doesn't only make 2 variants of its phone. There must be at least tens of models active in the development at any given time.

I don't wanna feed into this thread but what I said still stands, I have yet to see this perfection of anything.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

I would agree. But I don't hold out high hopes. After all, Nokia's main excuse for why the Diablo can't be upgraded to Fremantle was that the differences between OMAP 2 and OMAP 3 wouldn't allow it. And guess what? TI has announced OMAP 4.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Exactly! We all know Nokia can do better ( Ex: E71, E72, E90-2 ), and this phone was suppose to be on par if not kill the iPhone. Nokia is expected to do better because of their long history with making unique and in high demand products. It's a given that when a new product comes out it'll undoubtedly have bugs, but when so many people have said that the OS for the N900 is unfinished, allot of bricked devices ( via maemo and Amazon forums ), and mics just don't work, obviously Nokia isn't treating this product like the flagship device it should be.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

LOL Knowing nokia i would actually be surprised if they did so :p

Would I still buy the n950 or whatever comes next. most likely. But it feels good to know that the old hardware will still get some love :D

and I really don't have any idea about omap 4. But isn't it based on the same instruction set but with SMP added for OSes that support it.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

I think Nokia's goal is not operating system compatibility but application compatibility. Thus regardless of the OS you run, you will be able to run the latest and greatest applications (Granted it may be slow depending on how much the developer coded them to take advantage of the hardware).

Like I pointed out above, trying to keep operating system compability will lead to problems that Android is facing now and eventually Apple will have to face unless they plan on sticking with that screen resolution for the rest of the iPhone's line existence.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Yes of course, but what actually is that feature? What does not work as advertised? Scrolling isn't 100% smooth when scrolling so fast that you can't read?

It's quite difficult to QA a device to perfection if you want to release something sometime. The thread starter is in my opinion an exception among users as the scrolling issues don't seem to bother other users anywhere near as much. Even if it did, the wording of the subject is populistic and sensational.

Based on hype and forum posts I would tend to think most early customers would have rather taken the device with much more bugs already 2 months ago than waited until now even.