Everybody seems to be going at the messenger instead of the message.

Me for one, think you're kind of right. These things are not part of the default delivery. And adding all of these, especially portrait GUIs for all default/Nokia applications, is a matter of quite a bit of work. I don't think all of these will be fixed by 31.01.10. But some will, and I am sure they will have a deadline on many issues related to the "N920" release.

As to the whole missing features because the N900 was rushed, I believe this to be a partial truth. I believe Nokia is bleeding in the smart phone market, and I believe the N97 failure increased the need for the N900 to come sooner rather than later.

The N900 is however not a quickfix, but something they have worked towards for years. It's a milestone release for Nokia, and it is hardly a thrown together device. As such, I believe the main reason that the N900 is less than feature perfect on the areas you point out, is not rush, but the simple fact that it's a "first Maemo phone". First generation anything always lack something while it excels in other things. It's a basic "where did they put the focus with this device" resource management question.

The N900 excels in many areas. So it's not really unexpected that there are some things that simply are basic but nothing extra. The media are bound to pick out these as cons, and the discussions will go around them. Like the missing MMS was used against the Iphone for years.

Like Apple had to implement the MMS as much as they didn't want to, Nokia too will have to do something about their "cons" list, before their next device. And each software fix will be to N900 owners benefit as well.

The much-promised "first firmware fix" will disappoint a lot of people, cause it simply cannot deliver everything people hope for. No firmware fix was ever a solve-it-all.

So, you get a lot of flack for putting together a list of things you think should have been done right the first time. Well, I think you're right, each of them should have been done right the first time. But it could not be expected that _all_ of these things are done the first time, because as a platform for phones, Maemo 5 is brand new, and no first version of anything is ever complete when the sales starts.

All in all I think the Maemo team have done admirably, it's a big job and so far it seems like they're "hitting gold", quote gsmarena.