Before I get to work on some speed improvements i just discovered, i feel like blathering a bit.

I wonder if maybe we (or just I) tend to weigh the community discussions and contributions too heavily. How many tablets have been sold? And how many of those are being used without any software upgrades or 3rd party apps installed at all?

If I were a Nokia exec deciding where to allocate resources, I might look at gross tablet sales (around 400k?) and then the numbers of those users installing 3rd party apps or grabbing OS upgrades (??k) and conclude that the vast majority of tablet purchasers are just using the devices as-is and write off the afficionado and developer community as a fringe group.

If the ratio of 'upgraders and installers' among tablet users were in fact very small, then as a maemo insider making a business case to Nokia about investing in support (maemo.org, developer program etc), I'd probably find myself fielding hard-to-quantify assertions about a 'robust community' against the 'so what, xx% are buying them as-is' argument.

As developers, porters and product-fans, we may be simply not seeing those users who buy the tablets as fixed 'gadgets'. I'd be curious if anyone reading this could provide some basic statistics or indicators of what percentage of purchasers never install or upgrade. What for e.g. are number of downloads of OS2007 and OS2008 images vs gross unit sales?

Please don't take that as flame-bait. Just curious.
Cheers,