Dear readers,

this is my first posting to the meamo forum and I want to address it directly to Nokia people.

When I first heard of the N900 device in late August 2009 I thought that this would be a trustworthy replacement for my old Openmoko Freerunner phone.The maemo community is just as great as the Openmoko is so I preordered the new device on August 31st, 2009 from the German Nokia shop. Since I have no credit card for payment Nokia tells you on its ordering page that you have to transfer credit within five days. Well, so I did.

On that time (August 31st) the German online shop told me on its webpage that the shipment of the N900 would probably start on October1st, 2009. A few days later I wrote a mail to Nokia customer support asking whereas my credit transfer was received. I got an answer from them that my payment was received on September 2nd, 2009 and that the N900 would probably start shipping on October 12th, 2009. I was wondering why an automatic mail notification that your payment was received would not be send.

Meanwhile I started reading the maemo forums and all the discussion when and where the N900 would finally start shipping.

It was here where I first read that the shipment date for Germany was pushed back from October 12nd, 2009 to October 30th, 2009.

The next thing I read here four weeks later was yet another delay from October 30th, 2009 to November 25th, 2009.

In any case I didnt get a single notification mail from Nokia about the delay. I only got the information from the maemo forum and occasional visits to the German online shop.

You might wonder why I am writing this to the forum and not to customer support. Yes thats what I did a few days ago. However I didnt get a single line of reply from them simply ignoring a qualified concern.

This behaviour is very frustrating and not customer friendly. I can accept delays for whatever reason, but I want some official information.

On the other hand I didnt understand the delay. Reading about 300 summit devices with final hardware revision send to beta testers for the mass preproduction os test is ok, but I would bet that for most customers it would be fine using a device thats updated frequently until its final os state. You simply do this everywhere. My Ubuntu desktop is updated regulary, Windows get updates now and then. Creating a bug free os is impossible.

So if maemo as Nokia states is a community driven os, why there is no trust in the community by pushing shipment dates back for nearly two months and ignoring paying customers?

Thanks for reading this -- I feel better now :-)
Nekron