I feel that I must also say something to this as I have been seeing many posts like this across the web..

I must say that I can't fully understand the comparison between Nokia smartphones and Apple iPhones backward compatibility. Why?

How many different phones does Apple have?
- 3, as I understand it.
How many categories of phones does Apple have?
- 1,

both of these questions are easy to answer, now, what if I ask you how many categories of phones and how many different phones does Nokia have? Now you may see my point.

With a company as large as Nokia, you just can't expect total or even widespread backwards compatibility as they move forward at a high speed, constantly developing new models in many different categories. As Nokia has said, they have many different phone models that are meant for many different usage situations.

From Wikipedia I found that until March 2009 Apple had sold 21.4 million iPhones. 21.4 million phones that are designed for the same purpose and are basically the same. Of course they have made improvements but still they have to be for the basic parts of the system the same for the sake of backwards compatibility.

As for Maemo, Nokia has openly said that Maemo 5 is a step 4 in a 5 step program. If you demand for backward compatibility then there is no way that step 5 would differ from step 1 too much and were is the progress in there?

As for Symbian devices that Nokia sell, if I remember correctly Nokia last year sold 13 phones per second, thats almost 410 million phones in a year. 410 million phones that are designed for different kind of users and for different kind of usage situations, how on earth are you going to keep compatibility between that amount of different phones?

Ps. Sorry for any possible grammar issues, english is not my native language