...what we announced in the Nokia N900 press release is still the plan, no change: "The Nokia N900 will be available in select markets from October 2009..."
Maemo 6 alpha SDK in q1 2010, beta in Q2 2010. Happy Waiting! ;-)
There are a limited number of new Hutchinson 3G SIM cards that require a specific technical SIM card support in the mobile device. Nokia N900 has not originally been designed to support this operator requirement. As soon as we found out about this requirement, we started to work on the solution. A software update for the Nokia N900, estimated to be available by the end of this year, will fix this issue.
We said at the Maemo Summit that portrait mode for the browser shall be made available as software update by Xmas 2009. I guess we don't want to wait that long for Nokia N900 first shipments? So, portrait browsing in browser will be out later than the first shipments.
Not Sweden, nor UK, nor US, will get devices before we start shipments. This information is fresh from Nokia and it takes some time for retailers to update their availability times. We haven't been sitting on this information just waiting for October to end. Otherwise we could have just waited until November, the 1st to tell you.
In reference to your questions on the expected shipment date of the Nokia N900, let me tell you the latest information from Nokia: The Nokia N900 is a great example of what we and the open source community have been able to achieve with Maemo software. We are working closely with open source developers and for example, at the Maemo Summit in October, we loaned 300 pre-production units to get more feedback from the community. This feedback is extremely important to us and as such we also want to provide the best user experience with the Nokia N900. We expect it to start shipping during November 2009. Peter Schneider Head of Maemo Marketing Nokia Corporation
Ladies, gentlemen, as much as I love the discussion, are you sure you want to continue these threads endlessly? The day we start shipping you will see a Nokia press release announcing just that. The first Nokia N900 will not magically appear in some shop suddenly, somewhere, sometime, but we will let you know when we start shipping from the factory. And yes, we've gotten some decent feedback from the community after the Maemo Summit from those 300 devices we gave out with some things we haven't detected in our usual-for-all-devices testing around the world. Some of this feedback, we want to take into account in both the first sales software release i.e. PR1.0 and some in software updates we provide later this year.
I think I can safely promise you "before 2012"! (Because I will look for another job if this thing soon doesn't leave the factory).