I acknowledge your concerns.

Remember that Nokia is a rather large organisation, and the people who deal with releasing information and selling devices aren't used to working in a more "open source" (i.e. more transparent) way.

If Maemo proves successful and they recognise that success is connected with it's openness on a technical level, then we can hope the positive feedback induces some gradual cultural change to spread through the organisation. We can't count on it, but there's a chance.

Right now, there's no reason to believe that any organisation can deliver technology at this level in the huge numbers that phones are produced, while being as transparent about each step of the process as we would like. I don't think it's been done. Can you think of examples?

Actually, scratch that. I think Nokia are being stung in part because they've been somewhat transparent about Maemo's development and release plans.

If an S60 phone was delayed by several months, it wouldn't be a big deal. Nobody would care, it's be just another moved release date - common in the industry. There wouldn't be hordes of people with high expectations getting sorely disappointed.

In some ways, perhaps the biggest mistake they made was to announce a retail release date too early, and to accept preorders. They'd have been better off generating buzz, and accepting preorders when it had passed QA, had a manufacturing and delivery pipeline sorted out, and was definitely going to be in the shops a couple of weeks later.

In short, they cocked up, and something went wrong, but it looks to me like we're all suffering in part because of too much information coming out, in some aspects, rather than in spite of it.

Oh, and because it's a phone. Everyone expects it to do all the things that previous Nokia phones do very well, despite it being a completely new line of development and the old phones being extremely mature software. If it wasn't a phone, there wouldn't be such excitement, such passion, such complaining...