Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I knew this was coming, but I was hoping I could delay it long enough that someone would come up with another phone running a proper Linux OS to which I could jump, hacks and scripts at the ready, with glee and abandon.

Alas, such a product has yet to grace our plane of existence, and though I thought I could stand my N900's glacial pace at loading Internet content for at least a few more months I made the crucial mistake of accepting a friend's Nokia Lumia 520 (which he loathes) as payment for reflashing and fixing his Android (which he loves).

It's the cheapest, weakest entry-level Nokia smartphone currently in production and it runs an OS I don't really like (WinPhone being as proprietary and closed-source as it's possible to be).

And it blew my overclocked N900 into the weeds.

The magic is broken; I can't go back. If I were to try I'd curse the N900's slowness every time I opened a webpage, and I know I don't want to do that. I've brought it back from the dead and hacked it and fixed its USB and glued a massive battery to its back and loved it greatly, and with all the effort I've put in it and the personality it has I'd much rather remember it with fondness. As a result I've decided to retire it permanently and maintain the good memories unspoiled, though it's my hope that I'll find some alternative non-mobile use for it at some point.

I don't know where the future will lead me. I might keep the 520 as a stopgap while I wait for another phone with a proper OS, but while WinPhone does its job it's tough to swallow going from a super-hackable tiny Linux computer with the side benefit of making calls to a super-stock system on which I can't even replace the stock touchscreen keyboard.

Or I might go Android. It has its flaws - chief of which that of being a supermassive inefficient resource hog - but it's open and free and tweakable and it has a million and one apps. I'd have to get a whole other phone, though, which is an expense I'd prefer to avoid, because I'm very prone to the "ooh, this one is only €20 more expensive but so much better" syndrome that starts with looking at €130 low/midranges and ends with buying a €300 phablet, then wondering why my debit card is empty.

Whichever way I go, though, I'll miss with all my heart the tiny linux-phone that could, not to mention its awesome community which kept it going against all odds in an increasingly unfriendly world for as long as it was humanly possible.

Thanks to you all, and farewell. We shall see each other again when and if a proper successor to the N900 arrives and the fun can begin anew.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Farewell, I hope you've enjoyed the experience.

As one leaves, another returns. :)
I pulled out my N900, from a 9 month hibernation, last week to... just play with.
I've since retired my HTC One and rediscovered the thrill, customisation, and featues of this device, hope you will to. :)

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Never used a Windows phone but had to use an Android as a stop gap for a couple of weeks while my N900 was temporarily indisposed and I can tell you, I was so relieved to come back to this old, sluggish dinosaur.

No Linux phones? I take it you are not aware of the N9, Jolla or the Neo900 project?

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

if I turn off Javascript I find my non-overclocked N900 loading my daily web pages pretty fast.
I recon that using an Android for a couple of days is a good cure against N900 tiredness :D Luckily there is also some hope on the horizon that one day we might buy a new motherboard for our N900 (NeoN900 project)
After a brief Jolla adventure I see myself end up with an NeoN900... http://neo900.org/

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Take care :)

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I was in your position, but you'll be back, one day you'll pick it up again and just be like, why did I ever leave.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I have switched to N9 as my daily phone. Fast (at least when compared with N900) and having essential features that I need. So I am pretty happy about it. Still have my N900 though.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Actually, I am.

The N9 doesn't look like a tremendous improvement over the N900 (for instance it still uses a single-core A8, though the gig of RAM is actually pretty good), is hard to get ahold of and expensive even second-hand. New old-stock ones don't seem to sell cheaper than €250 here, which for a three-and-a-half years old phone is rather a lot of money.

The Jolla is very expensive and only barely out of vaporware status. I might get it eventually, but I'll wait for it to become available cheaper and at a consumer level rather than "preorder now and you might get yours in a few months".

And the Neo900 seems very underwhelming to me. I had a look at its specs and most entry-level phones of today do better, and for the bare motherboard they want as much money as you'd pay for a super-high-end top-of-the-line phone of the sort bought by people who have too much money to bother spec-hunting.

If the bare motherboard cost the €70-or-so that its specs would justify (seriously, there are €40 Android-on-a-stick computers that do so much better it isn't even funny) I might give one a shot, but for the money they're planning to charge it's a complete non-starter as far as I'm concerned.

I don't want you to think I'm disgruntled or disappointed; I fully realize a cottage operation like the Neo900 can't hope to match prices with giant Chinese sweatshop industries that churn out Android sticks by the million, and I sympathize, but the fact remains that the price remains unjustifiable for my wallet.

Anyway... I wrote the post yesterday; by coincidence, today I got some pretty heavy news - which means I'll have to switch priorities and fairly serious things will be on my mind for a while, and I can't really be bothered matching specs and phone hunting right now. I think I'll keep the 520 for the time being, and wait until this particular situation has blown over before looking at other phones. Hopefully by then I can actually buy a Jolla or a Ubuntu phone, or even something with Tizen in it.

Which would be fine if most websites didn't work at all with Javascript disabled. I'd love it if there was a law mandating every site to have a "works on a Pentium 133" static version, but this isn't the case.

You mean you owned a Jolla? How was it?

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Is Windows Phone any less of a resource hog? Or do they just mask it by not multitasking worth a crap?

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Actually I'd like to know that too. My first guess qwould be yes, since WP apps run natively and not emulatedvinterpreted/virtualized/whatever, but I have no personal experience to back it up with.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Looks like the possibility to write an app with native code is something they just added to WP8.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...v=vs.105).aspx

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Similar story here but I've not left d community. Still love my n900. I was using a N9 n d screen got smashed. So I went back to my n900 which was still adequate. I didnt get lumia cos of all d bad things I had heard on maemo.org.... then one day I got my hands on a lumia 520 n was shocked at how fast it was for a low end windows phone n how much better it was than my n900. I knew then there was no turning back... I now use a lumia 925 and very very satisfied. I just wish maemo.org guys would not knock WP so much. Its not perfect but I think its very adequate. Now planning on getting lumia 1520. That looks fantastic.

Android OS on d other hand just sucks resources... I have a galaxy note 10.1 and I am contonually running out of ram

The N900 is still d greatest phone ever made. I used to surprise my friends all d time with d things it could do. Now I only use it for cutetube and when I feel like doing SSH. My touchscreen is now all scratched up

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

The specs are not set in stone but it's limited what components are used due to keeping the device backwards compatible.

I understand your POV but the point of the Neo900 is to have a more up to date N900, without having to start again.

Remember the N900 is 4 years old now and can still hold it own.

I don't think I could put up without Fremantle for long. I am sure there are others that agree.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

The WP is a not a bad alternative it may be one of the best alt at this moment.
Personaly I do rather have a modern day swiss knife that has tcpdump, yamas, that can monitoring a pseudo device in wireshark and can create a admin passwd for example.
By having multitask and a HW keyboard on a cellular would be in my opion the only way to make people productive on a device they' re forced to use nowdays so let's look forward to the Neo900.
I do advice John's Phone to a doubter.
Thanks

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I was actually shocked how horrible nd locked down windows phone is, but thats just my experience as i like to mess with my devices, so i prefer operating systems like maemo or android, but if i ever have to choose a dumb and locked down phone, it will definetly be a iphone. IMHO iOS is a MUCH better alternative than windows phone.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I can run NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib and astropy on my N900. When I'm in my office or at home, I can redirect the n900's display to my workstation's display (getting the full screen resolution, by redirecting X11 via ssh). I can mount my N900's file system on my workstation via sshfs. When an Android/iOS/WP phone can do all that, I'll start taking one of those platforms seriously. I know Debian or Ubuntu can be installed on an Android device. I've tried several of the methods of doing that on a rooted Nexus 4 that I have. None of the methods I've found result in a usable linux chroot environment that coexists smoothly with Android. If you want a full-fledged workstation in your pocket, as far as I know the N900 is still the best choice. It's slow, but it's irreplaceable.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Definitely irreplaceable.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Surprisingly so. I'm actually quite amazed at how smooth and fast it is on the 520's hardware. I've used new-ish Androids with similar configurations (dualcore 512ram) and they've all felt much less snappy.

Considering who's making the OS it's surprising how well it works. I've used portable operating systems from Microsoft in the past (I have a pocketPC that runs WinCE and a Samsung i840 that runs WinMobile) and they've always felt like Microsoft didn't entirely know what they were doing. CE is a massively cut-down version that feels like Windows with just one leg and no arms, and WinMo actually kinda-sorta works but it's a usability mess with an unclear interface.

Not so WP8; the interface works, the software works and since I started using it the whole thing has been - and believe you me, I'm fully aware of how ludicrous this sounds - rock-stable. Seriously, I have yet to see one crash or unexplained slowdown.

The system does have a number of flaws: for instance, it's closed-down to annoying levels (you want a file manager? Nope - there's no way to access the internal filesystem) and subjected to abundant corporate stupidity (installing MapQuest, which is apparently supposed to be unavailable in Europe for reasons unknown to me, required setting the phone's region to the United States and adding an American proxy to the wifi settings).

I still think Android is a better system for phones from low-midrange upwards, because they have enough power and resources to make it work well despite its natively inefficient nature, and once smoothness is achieved Android's main problem goes away and its many advantages utterly crush the competition.

However, for cheap low-end phone hardware I've no doubt that WP is the smoothest, fastest system currently available. Whether that also makes it better for you depends on how much compromise you're willing to tolerate over its closed nature. Me, I'm doing moderately well - but I do get the occasional moment where I want to scream at Microsoft for not giving me anywhere close to the control I'd like over the phone.

Multitasking actually seems to work fairly well. It's not quite as intuitive as it is on a desktop machine or Linux portable, but I haven't had the sort of headaches Android likes to give you in low-RAM environments.

Is there any point in ever upgrading to a 925, considering how well WP8 runs under the 520's hardware? It doesn't seem to need the additional power. Did you feel any difference between the two?

Truth be told, WP is the sort of system you'd give to your mom. It does its job, yes, but that's all it does - there's no way to convince/coerce it into doing anything else. Compare with Android, which can be bludgeoned, hacked and subverted into doing all sorts of unplanned things - if you have the patience and willpower.

I'm also annoyed at the impossibility of using a hardware bluetooth keyboard, as there's no support for external HID devices in WP8. Having a physical 'board would remove one of my biggest gripes with WinPhone - the lack of alternative input methods.

No Android device truly gives its best without a tweaked custom ROM. I've seen horrible clunkers that became very pleasant to use after a reflash.

I disagree. I've used it on a friend's phone, and I consider it the worst of the big three systems currently available. It feels like a mobile OS reimagined by Fisher-Price. Besides, iPhones are far too expensive.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I agree that WP devices, even the lowest-end 520 are pretty slick with the UI, and pretty solid to use.

The problem is that you simply cannot DO things with them due to the device being locked down!

If slick UI and stability are your main requirements, why not get a N9 or Jolla instead, where you have the possibility of making the device behave like you want, not like BillG likes it to behave?

Examples of some problems with WP; you cannot change look/feel/font/anything to be better readable, for example, you have no end of trouble getting any media in it, calendar alerts send always email to you, and it happens long past the event has occurred... (why do I want an email of the event for gossakes anyway?)

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

It feel that it is truly unbelievable how mixed and different experiences people give on this. At my workplace we are now being all forced to the Lumia world. And exactly for instability issues there has actually risen an "aftermarket" for old E and N series phones here.

Don't know if it is somehow related to corporate security level usage, but I can't make more than two or three days at best without having to willfully reboot or get the phone totally frozen. And this is the same for most of us in my work place. If you dare to use the phone for something else than calling and email, you are bound to in trouble. And we are no small or somehow specialized company with it's own computer/security system/servers, but big multinational company that has nothing to do with IT-business. Also our operator that delivers the phones and care is the biggest one in Finland.

My phone has already been (its is less than 5 months old 820) to care because it started to malfunction badly (screen and software. For example using camera would make the screen unreadable). I also tried to take it there earlier because I noticed that I couldn't access our company intranet with computer to which I was using the Lumia as a hotspot. Answer from the Tech guys: "Yes, we can't let Lumia phones in because they are so unstable with their connections and security is not working well enough"

But then again, my dad has the same phone and he totally agrees with you and everyone who says that it is stable and fast and good to use. He likes it because he feels that it is as easy and fast as Nokia 6110 that he used to own so many years ago. And also he tells to you that with this phone he can get to internet :D

I think that Lumias and their user experience has been designed really really extremely with average Joe Phoneuser in mind

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I wonder how that is possible, unless you need some specific WP application at work, something that you cannot do without.
At my workplace, naturally, the devices offered by company to employees are Nokia-brand devices, and since Symbian went it's way all you can get is Lumias.

However, a growing number of people turn that offer down (or accept the device and give it away to children/parents/spouses) and buy their own devices, used to be N9's and iPhones but now I see more and more Samsungs, Sony's and HTC's around the coffee tables.
And as it happens, I am not the only one who preordered Jolla, even as I sure was one of the first to get it :D

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Frankly, I never understood this "spec race" mentality. It reminds me of GHz race of late 90', or video RAM race for GPU's in 00' (being notorious overclocker, gaming-rig builder, etc, I always laughed at it very hard).

What's use for super-duper awesome hardware specs, if OS (that you're locked to) is so limited, that you won't ever have a chance to use those spare processing power, for anything meaningful? And belive me, for such mundane tasks as browsing web pages, you won't feel that additional cores/RAM difference between Neo900 and hardware0ze super0ze <whatever> device you might be aiming at.

Me - I'm gonna swap triple or quadruple as much hardware power, for unlocked bootloader and (as) open (as possible) operating system, any day. I'm really not interested in buying high-end hardware, just to have spare, unused horsepower, OR excuse for poorly educated devs to write closed-source bloatware, filled with memory leaks and lack of optimization.

But - a side note - it is the same with gaming consoles, and people are still buying them, even if it's against any logic, so... ;)

/Estel

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Man alive, my posts are becoming quite alarmingly long. Hey, take them as a stream-of-thought almost-review of WinPhone. :P

I don't think it's fair to say you can't do things with WP8. There are many things you can't do, true, but it achieves most of what most people want from their phones.

If you don't care about the WP kinda-sorta-review feel free to skip from here to the next bold line

With the 520 I can go on the internet with plenty of speed (using IE, even - not that I wouldn't replace it if I could, but amazingly it seems to be doing its job acceptably), I have Facebook, Whatsapp and Evernote, offline GPS (with more GPS apps available if I could be arsed to install them and download their maps), a music player that actually, incredibly, works well in stock form (the lack of a good stock player is something I've never forgiven Android) and TuneIn radio.

There are things I can't do, of course. IE is, well, IE, which is a constant background annoyance in my mind not so much for its problems (the WP8 version doesn't really seem to have many), but because when you've hated something with extreme emphasis for the past 18 years, suddenly finding out a version of it actually works does not automatically eliminate all the hatred.

The Facebook app works OK when it's open, but when it isn't the system-resident applet can't quite seem to catch most private messages and display the notification.

The music player can't read Ogg Vorbis, which I like to use to shrink my music library so I can fit more of it on flash memory with no appreciable loss of quality.

And I can't replace the keyboard. I've always thought when you have a touchscreen that allows you to slide and gesture, maintaining the qwerty metaphor is an inefficient relic of habit and tradition; this is why I love Messagease, and why I dislike qwerty touch-boards. (Yes, I do know about 8pen; suffice to say, even my enthusiasm for different keyboards has a sanity threshold.)

But as far as qwerty touch-boards go, the WP8 one is the least evil I've seen. I can actually type at decent speed on it - entirely because of the word prediction and error correction, without which it'd be a constant nightmare of going back and fixing mistakes.

Most of this stuff wouldn't be a problem in Android. There are browsers aplenty, alternative Facebook apps by the dozen, the entire system is Vorbis-compatible and I can't possibly be bothered to count all the alternative keyboards that have come out.

But, and this is the key issue, getting all this stuff to work smoothly and with no multitasking issues in Android would require a phone costing rather more than the 520.

Stop skipping here

Give me a quadcore Android phone with two gigs of RAM for €100 and I'll ditch the 520 and WinPhone so fast it'll make your head spin. Until that happens, I'll stick with what works well without hurting the wallet.

Money. As I mentioned previously the N9 is expensive even second-hand, and a Jolla goes for three to four times the price of the 520. I emphatically don't want to be walking around with €400 worth of hardware in my pocket. If I lose the 520, or smash it, or someone steals it, I'll be pretty damn unhappy, but more for the lost data in it and the hassle of getting and configuring/customizing a replacement rather than for the loss of the hardware itself. If that happens to a Jolla I'll be rather more miserable for much longer, not to mention more paranoid about actually using it for fear it might be damaged. This is also the reason (aside from the expense itself) why I won't buy an expensive high-end Android phone, or any iPhone.

And before you tell me the N900 was pretty expensive in its day: I got mine third-hand for a song because it had a dead battery and USB port and the owner couldn't be bothered to fix it.

How so? I loaded my music library in Windows MediaPlayer and it put everything on the phone effortlessly. In fact, putting content on MTP devices is the one thing I ever use WMP for - I tried using Winamp, but it couldn't keep the tags consistent across the link.

Not sure about emails, but yeah, the calendar app sucks. The reminders strike me as particularly stupid: you have 5 minutes, 10, 15, 30, 60, then the sanity stops and you get 18 hours, one day, and then a massive jump to one week. Because clearly nobody could possibly want a reminder, say, three days before the event.

I'm lazily looking for an alternative, if one exists; in the meantime I'm pretty happy using Google Calendar. It has no synchronization with WP8 devices, but it has the wonderfully simple and efficient option of sending you SMS messages as reminders - whenever you choose.

It probably is due to corporate security. WinPhone doesn't strike me as a system that would take kindly to high security limitations, user permissions and such. They don't seem to come built-in, so you'd need separate apps providing security, and those by necessity need to modify the system at a fairly low level - and modifying Windows at a low level has never ever been a smart idea.

Either this or you're using some badly programmed app for your firm that's screwing everything else up.

This might have something to do with the stupid, stupid, stupid fact that WinPhone shuts down the wifi link whenever the phone goes to standby. The constant connects and disconnects as everyone keeps taking their phone in and out of sleep can probably cause some pain in an environment that's already full of various other connections and network links.

You'll get no disagreement from me on this one. WP8 phones are thought for the non-tech-savvy, and in general for people who'd rather not bother with a smartphone if they only could avoid it - not for nerds, and most certainly not for hackers. It requires a good disposition to compromise for a nerd to use WinPhone; good thing is, the compromises are of the kind that annoy you somewhat, not that make you want to throw the damn thing out of a window.

Nowhere did I say I'm aiming at super-devices, I just think it's ludicrous to spend so much money on a device that isn't one.

You may be right though, the Neo900 might be fast enough to load stuff just as fast as the 520, or maybe even more (though I'm not at all sure its single-core A8 would exactly rock my world). But the bare motherboard costs from €500 to €700. There's a limit to how much expense is justified by an efficient and open OS, and as far as I'm concerned this is very far above it.

No disagreement here - I've been a PC gamer since day one, on a mighty 8088. :P

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I recently got a Blackberry Z30. I think it's pretty amazing. The OS is crazy efficient in its design. TRUST ME: this is not the OS you remember. The OS borrowed a lot from Meego/N9, but is less convoluted IMHO. Seriously, I don't know why the Blackberry 10 OS isn't more successful. I am thoroughly impressed. I still use my N900 as a media player, because it's super flexible, has excellent sound quality, and has FM radio (though FM radio is enabled in leaked BB10 updates). I am debating on whether to sell the N9. I can't imagine ever using it now--except as a backup. But the N900 is forever.

And the Z10 recently was going for crazy cheap. I really think people should consider BB10. It does have a file browser. :-) And is the only OS supporting flash currently, I believe. And if can run a lot of Android apps.
And the "Hub" is genius.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I have a hint for Blackberry: if you're gasping for breath under the attacks of your competitors, desperately need to get some users back and have managed to make a decent OS that actually stands a chance, you might not want to put that OS in high-end phones with high-end prices that would push away the majority of potential customers even if they weren't already afraid you'd die tomorrow and drop support for your €600 phone.

Make low-to-medium end phones, regain a sizable portion of the pie, and then you can go for the high ends.

The Z10 still sells for €400 upwards here, which is a lot for a model that is no longer hot, barely supported at all by app writers and unlikely to remain supported by blackberry itself for long.

The only way I'd ever see myself going for a Blackberry now would be if they pulled a HP TouchPad and sold off everything at super-discount prices.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Fair enough. I remember being a little shocked, too, when I first saw proposed prices. Then, I gave it a second though, and frankly, for (highly) mobile computer in my pocket, I don't see any better way to spend same amount of money (buying six N900's doesn't count ;) ). Also, Neo900 folks have quite solid explanation for price range, *and* for hardware specs possible to achieve.

Currently, my finances aren't in state allowing purchase of Neo900, but I still think that "voting by my money" - even if it means saving for quite long time - is a way to go for supporting such initiatives. After all, it's a choice of throwing my (hyphotetical, at this point ;) ) money at big fat company that *doesn't* produce devices I like, or throwing 2x or 3x more money on project that does *exactly* what I like, getting the best possible (at time of writing) device, that suits my needs.

Otherwise, instead of spending money on what please my inner "geek", I would force myself to change my regular usage to something resembling winphone/android/ios gray mass. This is something that is far below considering.

Also, there is a huge chance, that by throwing my money at correct project, I'll participate in making possible creation of even better, future device with FOSS spirit - instead of ensuring, with my purchase, that some andro/windocrap company will release next useless device in 6 months.
---

so, summing it up, I understand your points of view (and even feel sympathetic re "price pain"), but not necessary agree, that "giving up" to lame devices is a way to go.

Cheers,
/Estel

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Saying Jolla is barely out of vapurware status is insulting, i mean the Jolla crew basically pulled of a miracle

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

quite

I disagree, tho' it is o/t. Jolla did themselves proud - a great achievement, no doubt. The miracle however, will be to survive, as Jolla "phonemaker" in the long-term.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

Fair enough. I just read on Wikipedia and it says Jolla announced their intentions in july 2012. Considering they've made a system and phone from scratch, I suppose a bit more than a year's development time isn't long enough to call it vaporware. I probably felt that way because I've been waiting for a better OS for a while now, and it seemed to me more time had passed than it actually has.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

I have heard the general rule of thumb in the industry is that it takes at least 18 months to do a new phone. Of course you can try to shorten it, for example, by buying already completed reference phone from ODM. If you want hardware changes or want to run OS that isn't already adapted and tested on the hardware then it might not expedite the process much.

Re: Farewell N900, farewell Maemo, and farewell to all of you beautiful people in the community
 

there's no difference actually becos wp8 is quite efficient. I just changed for the screen resolution and the camera which takes beautiful pix. U guys might now hate nokia but the camera is just wow. Was at an event yesterday n felt proud at everyone marvelling at the pix. In this case some specs do matter for me.. There are fustrations tho like lack of a file manager! I don't really think the OS is for geeks like us :):p