Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

By selling a few hundred thousand tablets? Please. . . . It's a drop in the bucket compared to the mobile phone market. This definitely isn't about making a quick buck.

Flooding what market? The market that they pretty much created? And how? Releasing one device a year isn't "flooding" by any stretch of the term.

Minimal support? I seem to be receiving frequent and useful OS upgrades, and maemo.org is a huge resource for both developers and users in learning and distribution. Again, a few hundred thousand tablets is not revenue for Nokia.

Heck, this is exactly what Apple does (well, with the iPod—not enough historical data so far to make any argument on this point involving the iPhone as there's only one of them).

Er, well, we have four (well, you could make an argument for five) releases of the OS. OS2005 is entirely irrelevant, and if we consider the official releases only, then we're down to OS2006 and OS2008. That's two OS releases to worry about from Nokia's standpoint. With unofficial releases we're basically down to two again (OS2007HE and OS2008).

Old OS releases not running on newer hardware makes perfect sense, and the 770 incident, while unfortunate, isn't likely to be repeated. Work on OS2008HE is underway (so we'll probably end up with pretty good compatibility across at least three devices—probably five). Nokia has already said that the N800 will be good through at least Diablo (OS2009) (which wont be on the WiMAX tablet coming out soon).

Library breaks were necessary to keep the OS up to date with the upstream. It's unfortunate that it affects end-users so much, yet it is what it is, it's not something easily avoided.

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

Yes, I wish so too... :(
Perhaps we'll see 2008HE on the 770 one day... :D

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

I've got to agree with GeneralAntilles here, Nokia's approach to the tablets has been VERY restrained compared to their phone releases.

Nokia launch about 30 or 40 phone models a year including many smartphones, so even if you buy the latest Nokia phone you can bet that a newer model will be out within a week or two. This is what all phone makers do, it seems to be what the market wants, and if the iPhone takes off (ie. if it sells significantly more than the 0.5% market share it currently has) then Apple will be bringing out several models a year as well. The phone market is so fast moving because it sells more than all other electronic gadgets put together, so the time to recoup development costs on a particular model is much much shorter.

Nokia's tablets by comparison have had three models in two and a half years. This is very slow going by Nokia's standards, I don't think they're driving people into buying new devices at all.

If they wanted to force people into buying the latest tablet, they certainly wouldn't have issued OS 2008 for the N800 just as they were launching the N810, or bothered releasing Hacker Edition OS 2007 for the 770.

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

I read some of the posts here and I think waiting for the goodwill of Nokia is the wrong way. The worst what coult happen to the 770 are the Hacker Editions. They only block development of a free OS.

The solution is already in front of your nose. Currently I play with the debian image of apple2, which is fun. I use dual boot and can choose between "ebook mode" (maemo) and "all is possible mode" (debian) :).

@Johnx
Why not group together with Apple2 and others to make a debian rom for all devices. The worst what could happen is that Nokia pays you a large amount of money to stop :).
I think the community would support you also ...

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

How exactly does HE block it? By providing a choice? How is this different from OS2006? So I guess you'd like to limit people's choices so they need to pick free os (as the only choice)?

BTW, one can also help with Mamona.

Of course anyone is free to do what (s)he wants.

I've seen too much 'wasted' time on opie, gpe and whatever so my choice of wasting my time is collaborating with Maemo so the community around it grows and Nokia has reasons for opening it up even more. It is slow process but it is moving in right direction and we may end up with healthy open platform big enough to get into mainstream and have plenty of applications like palmos or windows mobile.

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

@fanoush: As much as I'm happy that Nokia continues to provide some support for the 770, I think that Modulok is technically right: If Nokia had decided to just drop the 770 on the floor when the N800 came out I think we would have seen 1) a lot *more* outrage and 2) more effort to get something besides ITOS on the 770. I don't know which way would have turned out better, but either way, it's useless speculating about "might have beens."

As for mamona: I looked at it but decided on Debian in the end, for three reasons:
1) I'm not interested in trying to put together a whole distribution from the ground up. It's way too much work for a small group of people to ever do effectively.
2) Debian is the closest match to ITOS in terms of package structure and naming conventions.
3) Other people are already bringing Maemo to Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/pkg-maemo

With that said, I *also* am committed to Maemo. I've owned a Zaurus 5500 and C1000* and have watched the transition from Sharp's software -> OPIE -> GPE and realize that it fractures communities to have so many different projects with so few devs. In most of the ways that matter Maemo seems "good enough." To me, getting Debian on the 770 seems like the shortest way to getting Maemo 4.x on the 770. And in the long run, getting Debian on the N8x0 seems like a good way to ensure that the tablets will be supported in one way or another as long as Debian armel is around (which should be quite a while...)

@Modulok: You're right. I should contact him. I would have sooner but he doesn't seem very active here after his initial post(s). :shrugs:

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

I still use maemo for some tasks because for these tasks I have no choice ... at the moment.

I personally think the HE is a bait on a hook. It makes developer think that everything is ok and there is no need to do something about an alternative OS. It shows user how nice the next OS version looks like but it is not fully compatible and not officially supported by nokia => to have fun buy a new device.

Johnx and Apple2 have shown that debian is running on the nokia 770 and the n800 (also n810?) what is more than nokia seems to be able to.
There is no need to start from scratch for every new ARM compatible device. Debian is running fast on the nokia 770 and surely will not slow down on a n800.

If you still believe that nokia is interested in building a free linux distribution then look how nokia is maximising its gain. You just have to read the latest news ...
If business runs as usual then we will see a a fork of QT sooner or later.

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

@Modulok: I believe "Hanlon's razor" applies here: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Nokia's forking from Debian is probably just an unfortunate result of Debian not having an armel port when Nokia started with ITOS, and a simple case of software diverging over time.
As someone who was previously tasked with getting Debian to fit in a 512MB flash drive for work (web kiosks) I can tell you that it is very, very easy to start diverging from your upstream distro when space becomes a problem. Fitting Maemo in 128MB of flash is quite an incredible feat, and obviously sacrifices were required along the way. I can tell you right now that my minimally functional Debian requires 550MB+ of flash. This can be reduced but it will never fit in the onboard NAND. Also, Debian is definitely using more memory than ITOS. This can be reduced but probably not solved entirely without making it something else besides Debian...
Also, I really do trust at least the Maemo team not to actively screw us over. They're not out to get you! Nokia as a whole probably doesn't care about us enough to be even bothering to use bait and switch tactics against us...
That being said, it *is* important not to be stuck in a "vendor lock-in" situation. But, let's concentrate on doing something productive rather than speculating on what Nokia might or might not be trying to accomplish.

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

Nope, the first ITOS was arm (not armel) and arm-Debian had been around for a while then and you even were able to install some Debian packages on the OS.

Re: 770 - the forgotten tablet
 

That's a word. I am currently productive :) ...
If you, Apple2 and perhaps others can manage to get "nearly" the same debian running on all the IT I will help finding bugs and possible solutions to get apps running. Then the whole community can contribute.