I just wanted to throw this out there and see what people think. I think Nokia lacks forward thinking and strategic planning. Why? I think it's impractical that everytime there's a new Maemo device there has to be so much porting or rewriting of applications. In retrospect and especially considering Maemo6 i'm thinking Nokia needs to do much better.

Here are my reasons.

N810 required different OS because of the introduction of the keyboard. The OS for the N810 wasn't backward compatible (not sure if that's 100% accurate). I don't remember exactly but I do believe they had to do a different version of OS2008 to make it work on the N800. The N810 could not use OS2007 apps... that was really dumb! I can totally understand N800 not being able to use OS2008 apps but uhh... the other way... that's unacceptable.

Maemo6 introduces multitouch... Maemo5 doesn't have multitouch. IMHO (could be wrong) but I do believe that this is gonna require another very long waiting period for apps to be transfered.

I remember trying to decide between a N800 and the N810... when it has just barely been released. I eventually went with the N800 because of the lack of apps available for OS2008 @ the time.

Unfortunately ... I think there's even going to be a bigger waiting period perhaps for the introduction of Maemo 6 since this will not just be porting but more than likely some serious code rewrites and redesign of logic to perform well in a multitouch environment. If it's hard enough to add portrait mode... wow!!! Imagine multitouch. All this time spent rewriting apps and porting apps could be better spent writing OTHER apps and growing the number of apps. Think about how many apps maemo.org would have now had there just been ONE OS that all the apps were written for.


I think this strategy is especially counterproductive because Maemo6 almost seems tangential when compared to Maemo5. Probably I'm just making a big deal out of multitouch... perhaps? Not sure. In a way, the N900 as it's placed doesn't make much sense when you think about it. Since as soon as there are enough apps for you to play around with... the buzz will be about Maemo6. The increase of apps will slow and the attention will be focused else where.

Finally... why is the model the same? I've heard they still plan to use the same processor? How feasible a decision is that? I've heard about SnapDragon processor and all this good stuff.

I think a company who is more forward thinking would have thought about how to control change such that future improvements slide right into place. Android does a better job of this. Was about to say Nokia has done better with Symbian... but then there are feature packs and that sometimes gets in the way. There are different versions of software for different feature packs. Come on Nokia... we have only see 4 maemo devices thus far... it CANNOT be THIS hard 2 ensure backward compatibility. I just think Nokia could do SOOO much more in terms of strategic planning.