...for the web browser. And it happened.

Other than that, Nokia has consistantly stated that Maemo has always been a landscape OS for landscape devices, the N900 being another one of those. Portrait support, we were told, would come in Harmattan.

It was bloggers who took Nokia's web browser portrait mode announcement and decided it must be a sign that Nokia had reconsidered. S60 phones support portrait mode, why not Maemo? And the false assumption echoed through the blogosphere until far too many people took it as true.

Nokia has abandoned many of their plans in the past five months, but universal portrait mode for Maemo 5 wasn't ever a promise they made.

And before Nokia released the N900, they had already announced Maemo 6/Harmattan was coming, dropping GTK+ for Qt, targetting multi-touch capacitive screens instead of resistive, replacing the entire look-and-feel, and leaving the N900 behind. There was disappointment, but no shock there; Nokia had already quickly abandoned every previous Maemo device as the OS evolved.

So, the surprises were:

• Nokia calls the OS that leaves the N900 behind MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan instead of Maemo 6 (Harmattan).
• The Harmattan device didn't arrive to bury the N900 as quickly as predicted.
• MeeGo, via the Community Edition, gives the N900 a better chance of keeping up with new kernels and other upstream changes than it ever had with Maemo 6.

I do. As I recall, the full story was the company contacted Nokia asking how to get the best return on their development efforts given they were small, with few developers. Nokia recommended targetting Symbian as that's a larger market with a higher percentage of customers paying for apps.

As much as I'd like to see more development for Maemo, I can't fault that logic.