Right, the community is back to speculating based on what we know because Nokia is being cagey.

What we DO know

• OMAP3 won't be ready for a commercial device until Nov '08
• The Alpha SDK release *might* be this year
• Nokia employees at the summit didn't know what hardware was in the device. It sure didn't seem like they were hiding the truth, it sure seemed like they just didn't know.
• Community members often seemed more knowledgeable on the n900 subject than the employees
• Developing Maemo 5 will be hard as there will be many new libraries and new hardware bugs to deal with. Look how much effort was put into Maemo 4 and they had production hardware to test with.

Engineering is not easy and I don't see Nokia dedicating even more resources then it already has working on Maemo ( 100+ employees? )

So yes we are speculating, but we are not just pulling that out of thin air and honestly I think many are being too optimistic. It took what 4 months to get Maemo 4.1 hammered out... and that was based on a production release of Maemo 4... we don't even have an Alpha SDK on a basically new stack.

So best case we see an Alpha SDK this year new year '08 + 4 months for a stable SDK + another month for a stable firmware. That's 8 months away being optimistic.