I'm sorry but I don't think that is acceptable at all. Everytime a new device is released you can't hide behind its short comings by saying another similar device had issues for 2 or 3 years. If you released your device 3 years later then you should have had time to study what was missing/wrong in the other device and fix them before releasing your device. Especially if that device has already fixed those issues. Otherwise your device is always going to be 2 or 3 years behind which obviously no company would ever want. This is not about iphone v N900 by the way. Just in general. technology moves forward very quickly and you can't just release something which has 3 year old problems that have now been solved elsewhere.

For example if you buy a blu ray player today you don't expect it to be missing features that blu ray players were all missing 3 years ago but are now standard today and say well give it two or three years since previous players did not have them until now. People would look elsewhere.

Back to the N900 and iphone now. I have seen on this site many times that N900 is not a phone, this device is for geeks, this is not Nokia's flagship device, or this is not intended to be a mainstream device. All these are used as excuses for us to excuse some of the N900s short comings. Does Nokia want to sell more or less of these devices? Obviously they want to sell more. Recent reports show that Apple is the most profitable in the phone busines despite selling far fewer phones than Nokia and being in the business for a second compared to Nokia.

Nokia is clearly a company set up to make as much profits as possible. They cannot be pleased that a company that has profits from elsewhere (itunes music downloads, sales of mp3 player, computers) and that is new to the phone business is making more profits than they are. The high end phones (let me say high end devices since N900 is not a phone) is clearly where the big profits are made. So Nokia wants to sell as many N900s as possible whether or not Nokia or the public say it is not a phone, not a mainstream device, the device is for geeks, etc. Unfortunately this just is not going to happen if it has flaws that are 3 years old.

By the way before someone gets the wrong impression I am not an Apple fan. I am a massive Nokia fan and in 10 years of owning a mobile I have only ever had Nokia mobiles. On the other hand no one in the world hates Apple more than I do. Broke the screen of my Creative Zen M and needed a new mp3 player. Bought an ipod touch 32gb because Microsoft smartly decided not to release Zune HD in Europe and Creative had lost their way in the mp3 business. But I couldn't live with myself having an ipod and had to sell it at huge loss after a few months. Now I have no mp3 player. Plus my baby son spoilt my N95 so now I have no phone (using my old N80 now). So I need a new mp3 player and also need a new phone.

So my rant is because I want Nokia to succeed because I love the company and I also want to have a great phone. Unfortunately, it seems that neither of these things are going to get to the level I was hoping for. We are likely to see reviews from the mainstream media which suggest even looks aside and ignoring limited apps the iphone is still the better choice simply because the N900 has three year old problems and this would surely hurt sales (which would surely hurt Nokia irrespective of whether people on this website do not want the device to go mainstream so that it can be their geek phone). I will also not be getting as great a phone as I would want because it lacks things I took for granted in my 50 year old N95.