Re: bad news from nokia today
 

to op:wtf. My device is about an year old. Placed my preorder about 375 days ago...
Even iToys get old in a year. Galaxy S will be prehistoric in an year etc...

So in nutshell: world doesn't rotate around you.

E: n900 has already beaten kin for 350 days or so....

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

there is plenty life in the N900 yet we have bright future maybe its with maemo or maybe with almost any OS you want
http://twitter.com/stskeeps/status/24195693319

http://al.robotfuzz.com/~al/maemo/u-boot/

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

With the N900 running an OS that is openly known to be a dead-end OS (no more devices to be sold with Maemo and Nokia development resources being moved from Maemo to MeeGo) how is that not effecting third-parties interest in developing for the N900? When the N900 is discontinued (now or in 4-5 months, who knows) how will that 'status' of the N900 not effect developers interest in developing for it - and the only official OS that it is supporting? Developers and s/w companies goes for where there is volume and some level of manufacturer-backed continuity for the platform. The N900 does not have either of them (sure there may well be a support release (1.3) but I would not expect anything after that.

I'll be the first to admit I know very little about Qt and how well adopted that is by the large, commercial s/w developers. I must admit that I've always considered Qt to be more of a community-developer tool and not something used by the larger houses. If so, I don't quite see your point as I was talking about commercial s/w products (games and applications) and not community efforts. I'm sure there will be many versions of File Managers and text editors that can run both on MeeGo and Maemo5.

Are you seriously telling me that you expect the Maemo5 platform to receive official and commercial third-party support into 'the distant future'? If you mean that it will not be 'discontinued' due to community efforts that is a different argument and discussion. I'm sure there are Commodore 64/Sinclair Spectrum user groups out there that are hacking and modding away but I would not make the argument that their OS is not discontinued based on that.

No, that is simply speaking incorrect.
Any s/w developer with commercial interests will base their interest on;
- Volume,
- Continuity (will the OS carry to the next h/w generation, compatibility, etc),
- Users (profile),
- Device life, and
- Adoption (how well is the OS adopted by other device makers).

Let me generalize for a moment:
If there are, say, 2 million devices sold running OS X, the userbase is mixed corp/non-corp - but the device and OS is about to be EOL'd it does not matter what 'state an appstore' is in or, for much longer, how many devices were sold. Assuming, again, that 2 million devices were sold (random made up number) and that there was an existing third-party commercial interest in the product - it is not far-fetched to extrapolate that the device was replaced with a newer, updated model running OS Y (to make this N900 relevant to some extent). With such a switch you will have a significant amount of users from the old OS X device switching over to the newer OS Y device (brand loyalty, obviously this was a successful product so the assumption is that enough R&D was invested into making something even shinier, etc). The number of devices sold - but now sitting at the bottom of a drawer - does not a sale make.

Cell phones are even 'worse' with an average of 2 years of usage (not life but usage before new purchase).

To sum up my ramblings: Number of sold devices becomes rapidly much less important and does not have the profound impact that you mention when you start looking at the other factors.

Once again, I was not arguing that community efforts would end. See my Commodore 64/Spectrum reference.

End comment (I know finally right...): One thing I don't know - and depending on the answer it would either support or nullify all my ramblings - is how these 'closed source, commercial grade apps/games' developed for MeeGo can/will run on Maemo5.

I'm not a developer and I don't claim to know if it's all just comes down to Qt-based MeeGo API compatibility - or if the kernel differences between the two platforms (MeeGo using DeviceKit to interact with the h/w (I think) plays a role as well.

I guess a simple question would answer it:
Would a copy of "Jurassic 3D Rollercoaster Rush 2" developed by "Digital Chocolate" to be sold for MeeGo device X run on N900 running Maemo5?

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

If the rebate doesn't go through smoothly and quickly, American Express will forcibly get my refund. I love those guys sometimes; no questions asked when it comes down to obtaining refunds.

We'll see. I truly do need a spare phone for overseas travel - my Motorola F3 is truly 100% no frills, would be nice to see stuff in color.

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

Exactly. But the difference is that new "Galaxys" pops out every day, and they all look the same, they all run the same OS, they all do the same thing. The N900 probably was/is a one off. A special made device for the hacker/enthusiast. The normal reaction would be to get at least one more N900 while they still are around, not to curse Nokia for producing the coolest device ever.

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

It's true for all phone.

"[INSERT ANY PHONE HERE] will be discontinued."

He should be relieved that you settled for such statement.

If I were you, I'd say, "as long as it's under warrant, do you fscking job". :D

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

It's because the Galaxy S is a line of phones, same 1ghz Hummingbird processor, same Super AMOLED screen, same 512mb of RAM and are customized per the carrier requests in terms of outer case while maintaining the same insides, et al. And selling rather well as a line of phones in South Korea, Europe and North America.

So yeah... they'll invariably do the same thing, run the same OS, and look similarly to each other... that's part of being in that family called Galaxy S. If they were markedly different, then you'd have fragmentation like no other and Samsung would probably have a support nightmare on their hands.

To me... their approach makes sense.

Nothing else officially ran Maemo 5, no real companies outside of Sygic made any software for it... I'd call it a definite one-off.

I have to question this. Was it really made for the hacker/enthusiast, or for the Nokia enthusiast? If it's the former, then that group didn't exactly buy in huge numbers. And if it's the latter, then Nokia messed up by EOL this so quickly. Only the Microsoft KIN (which... deserved to die) went EOL faster. Hell, I complained about the N810 going EOL after 13 months... N900 beat that easily.

Reports are saying that they're built like tanks, apparently "nobody" is having problems with the USB port any more and they're such a quality built phone. Are you saying that not even a year later, you feel prompted to buy another? For instance... I have had my iPhone 3GS for a year - screen is still great, it still works without incident, still is in near perfect shape. In fact, when I moved to my Captivate - one of those aforementioned Galaxy S spin-offs - I still keep it around because it works so gosh darn well as a music player and/or communication device. And with my N900 on its way, I don't anticipate the need to buy multiple one(s) because... well, it's well-built.

So why buy two or more? Conflicts with the above paragraph on some level.

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

I agree it is a sad state. I'm just saying that info is widely available for months now.

You couldn't be more wrong. This may sound as a marketing pitch, but hey - Qt's root were primarily commercial (just to name a few of the more $$$ oriented vendors using Qt in their commercial products: Autodesk, Google, Skype) and has just recently been pushed into the community arena with GPL licensing. Nokia is betting the farm on Qt software-wise. ALL (I hope I don't have to bold/fontsize this ALL) applications for Nokia phones will be done in Qt. Really, In Symbian^4 and MeeGo, Qt is the only official framework. Plus, to build momentum, you have it out-of-the-box on Symbian^3 and made available to legacy Nokia devices, going back as far as the N95. That's an ecosystem that has literally hundreds of millions of devices just from Nokia, not to mention devices from other vendors. And the N900 is part of that ecosystem, regardless of what a techsupport dude says on a Friday afternoon.

What people still don't realize is that there is no Maemo5 platform. There is a Qt platform. Maemo 5 is an OS supported by that platform. A subtle but extremely important difference.

No, it doesn't work that way really. It is STILL a very important factor for Ovi apps for example to run on a N95. It has been discontinued centuries ago, the successors had a less than stellar reception, but still, if you submit an app to the Ovi store, you make it work on the N95, period. I would agree with you on an armchair basis, but reality disagrees.

That is a very good question - the answer depends primarily on the publisher, whether they WANT to make it available (this in fact has no bearing how much longer Maemo5 is officially supported by Nokia). The actual technical effort is minimal, the API level stuff is almost identical as long as there are Qt updates, with packaging and DRM being the sticking points - and that is far more a policy question which will be decided by publishers on a case by case basis.

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

Well I told you I knew very little about this area ;)
Thanks for that area, I had no idea where Qt really came from or how adopted it was.

Then substitute 'platform' with OS in my statement.

I think we will have to agree to disagree on that point.

Also very interesting to me as this is an area that I admittedly am far from knowledgeable. I come from a belief of where the underlying OS is what determines if an application can be run or not. Reading the above it almost sounds as if the OS is secondary and the APIs/presentation layer is what determines compatibility. Something that I must admit I can't quite wrap my head around.
I guess in a way Windows operates in the same way where I can on a machine running Win7 run both Win XP and 2000 apps.
However, I do admit that I thought that the difference between Maemo5 and MeeGo was much more significant - more on par with Win vs Mac.

Re: bad news from nokia today
 

my opinion about commercial games developed for MeeGo being released for N900 is its not going to happen.
MeeGo will have all security and DRM in place so why would they release them for a device what as zero security and will be pirated in seconds it would then get recported so n900 zero security pirated version would run on MeeGo too.
even though DRM is rubbish and would end up getting pirated any way commercial companies will not make it that easy to happen.