As you can see from the post you've quoted, I owned a Galaxy S - got it from my company for free as we were developing some Android libraries, otherwise I'd hardly buy Android device. And I used iPhone 3GS for a couple of months but color me entirely unimpressed.

I'm not acting blind, and I'm not claiming by any means that 3rd party application availability is not an important thing to consider when obtaining a device (especially if you're not a developer or tinkerer), but claiming that some OS is a failure because it doesn't have n number of apps, or some specific app is a bit too much. In that sense I do find the whole app story - heavily overblown.

I've been using smartphones since the first days of Symbian, and when I look back, I've purchased at most 30-40 3rd party apps (collectively, for all smartphone platforms I've used) during all those years. And most of those weren't actually adding some new functionality - they just made the everyday tasks easier to perform than the `built-in` functionality or the functionality obtainable through free apps. Thus, I haven't yet found what's so appealing in a huge base of mostly completely pointless apps.

Then again, I am a developer, when I need something badly, if it's not already implemented, I sit down and write it myself. Well, most of the time I do it anyway, even if it's available, professional pride doesn't let me to pay for simple apps that I can write myself better ... And given that I mostly use my smartphone(s) for either surfing or having it run/check/track/whatever servers, apps, solutions and so on, that my company is keeping on their servers - both, the Maemo and MeeGo are almost a match made in heaven for me - now I don't even need to write separate frontends, with extremely simple porting I can run all the existing work-related app base right on my phone. N900 literally replaced my MBP.


As I've said, YMMV, personally I can't see why would anyone use Whatsapp when you have literally every popular IM supported right out of the box (or with a simple plugin installation) on the N900 (and the same goes for the N9 as well) - and not only supported, but implemented the best way I've yet seen on any smartphone platform. And there are IM clients for popular networks on other platforms as well so it's not as Whatsapp is the only way to communicate cross-device. Viber can't even hold a candle to Skype and Fring, both of which are available for the N900, with former having the best implementation on a mobile device yet seen. As for Kakaotalk, haven't used it or heard for it, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be hard to implement within the Telepathy stack unless it's proprietary...

There are certainly some apps and some use cases where N900 lacks, I just can't find any that would matter to me (and I'll go as far as to claim that it's the same case for the majority of users) - unless the point is reinventing the wheel for the sake of it as is the case for the aforementioned apps. I'm willing to bet that for the most users and use cases, on average, N9 would fare equally to the iPhone or any Android device, with or without a huge apps base - there are some areas where the N9 would shine (SN/IM/VoIP integration, media promiscuity, camera), and some areas where the iPhone would shine (games, Apple services, adapted media/interactive content), and... but on average, the most users will most of the time do the exact same things on any of those platforms without even considering the huge apps portfolio, or lack of it in the N9's case.

I don't think that the ~5% consumers with some specific need have the power to determine which platform will live and which platform will die. I for one could never use the iOS platform as it doesn't meet my specific needs, but those are quite `exotic` needs that most people can live without otherwise iOS would be a dead platform. Same goes for the N9 - I'm really trying to find out what is it lacking so much that a regular user cannot use it for the very same things he's doing on the competing platforms. Apps catalog certainly isn't the most determining factor in that equation.


Truth to be told, it took quite a while for the iPhone to get Chinese/Korean/Japanese input (at least via a 3rd party KB), and WP7 still doesn't support it (not at least without a 3rd party for which you also need to request other devs), and Android is not actually quite shiny in that department... While very important, especially considering Nokia's target markets (or at least those used to be in the top 10), I don't think that CKJ input support is a feature that makes-or-brakes a platform as well.


Ugh, I never was a good with audio-processing development (tho I did write a very basic t2s engine purely as a practice), so I'll have to skip that one, but there's an idea for somebody's coding competition entry (or a mean of revenue should he/she decide to pursue that goal) - if done properly, it would certainly be a success, especially now when Qt will be going down to s40 devices as well - no dumbphone has good s2t implementation apart from the basic voice navigation.


That certainly. Once again, I'm not saying that popularity of some platform, or the apps available for it, is not important - the problem is with people who are using that fact as an argument that a device is practically useless (zombie OS, dead-on-arrival, useless piece of junk, you name it...) if it doesn't have gazillion of apps. In that sense, apps availability is pretty much overblown, after all what percentage of any smartphone `group` is actually using it to make money and require an app of similar type as the one you've described?


In the bright, glorious future we're heading for, you'll probably need one, least you want to pay environmental taxes for gas release to the environment


You can rearrange application icons in the menu so you can put your frequently accessed apps on top thus you won't need to scroll + there will be `foldering` support added. With a grid of 24 icons - I highly doubt you use that much widget shortcuts.

Also, you can `fav` some of your contacts that will always appear on top of the contacts list in the phone app. Granted, with contacts shortcut on the desktop it's more elegant but it's not as if that would seriously hinder the usability. Even the live views of some apps presented as widgets (OMWeather for example) have an alternative - they can display in the notifications panel, or they can be seen in live app grid, so widgets won't be that much missed in that case as well.

What I find the most troublesome with the lack of deskto(p)/widgets are the control widgets (i.e. Media Player) because even tho you can display it on the multitasking view, you still can't interact with it without focusing the app, making the process longer and tedious. We need an UI/UX guru to figure a replacement for that one...


... out of a cannon... into the sun...