Everything is speculation now at best...

Personally, I'm surprised that Nokia went through with the N9 given the recent announcements in general.

Now, Nokia has been quite generous in terms of its firmware updates in the past with their Symbian phones. A lot of new features were back ported from newer Symbian phones into older ones - although I assume it was easier since the platforms were essentially exactly the same.

If the new Nokia Maps (since the OVI brand is supposedly no more?) is entirely written in QT, then there is that technical possibility that it could be built for Maemo 5.

But I'm not holding my breath. Technical possibility and technical ease doesn't mean they will do it. Business decisions always drive technical decisions.

Given their underwhelming support for the N900 in recent days and also with the move to Windows Phone, I personally doubt that they will expend any serious amount of effort or money on bringing anything back to Maemo. No matter how easy it may be.

I have a friend who once worked as a quality assurance tester for another mobile phone company, and he recounts that there were countless bugs that the developers knew about and that they could have fixed. But time and budget directed them to just leave the bugs unfixed. He said that he later saw someone using the phone he was working with and the user was experiencing a bug that he saw during development. And his comment was that he knew about that bug, but they deliberately chose not to fix it.

No doubt Nokia works the same way. I would say they've been alright with Symbian, in terms of bringing fixes about in time. But Maemo has different business implications than Symbian.

Of course, I do believe it would be an excellent gesture on Nokia's part to release the N9 version of Nokia Maps for Maemo, perhaps even as one of their Beta projects. As long as it's less buggy than Sygic Mobile, I'd be content.