I though it was a huge let down. the guy from wind river had a much more entertaining and thoughtful presentation.

As a Developer

I didn't get anything from the speech except that the device would be faster. Great, because speed was such an issue in the previous devices. While more speed would be welcomed, it's hardly the glaring problem that I would say... scratchbox is, the poorly documented closed pieces, the quirky MicroB browser, the reboot loops, or the general difficulty of developing native Maemo apps.

I will end up with more platform diversity, and not in a good way.

I don't doubt Nokia's contributions to the open source community are huge, but I still get the distinct impression they "still don't get it"

As a maemo.org community member

Nokia can't just keep throwing out "great hardware" and expecting us to pick up the slack. This time the "great hardware" may or may not come branded from a carrier ( and make no mistake, they will muck it up ). Each carrier will want it's pound of flesh and it the community be damned.

We will have every problem of before and now we will have carrier branded issues to deal with as well.

As a user

One of the points of the n810 was it WASN'T another poorly done convergence device. My n810 is my "digital duct tape" able to perform a lot of free form tasks without too much effort. It is not, and has never been, a good "utility device" like a phone or a PDA. I would be pretty pissed off if my $$$ phone suffered from reboot loops or couldn't tell the difference between a contacts home and work number. In a duct tape device I can gloss over many of the problems because of what I can do as a hacker because I don't expect the kind of reliability that a phone needs to offer.

I expect more from a utility device when it comes to the base system. I did not get any impression from the speech today that the existing flaws with the n810 as a utility would be solved ( say via VM'ing or other, high level, system protection methods ).

When it comes down to it why would I, as a user, buy this device? By the time it's release we will have Android to compete with as well as the iPhone. Both of these other platforms offer a bevy of built-in or low cost applications that have more polish than many of the best Maemo apps.

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Basically I felt like once again he was sitting up there talking down to the community. He sat up and talked about openness, while being coy on if this new device will contain just a data radio or the full phone stack. He talked about working with upstream projects but refused to state compatibility with existing hardware.

Based on this very limited information I am not terribly excited about Maemo 5 or the hardware that it will run on.