This issue has picked up steam because of one thing... "Free Maps"...

That's it... If that announcement wasn't made or if the majority of those that are crying now were simply given free navigation, (or any freakin' navigation for that matter) we wouldn't see as much turmoil. Premature demands for statements regarding backward compatibility would not be as loud.

Many users may believe that they are stuck with what they now have and that the current OVI maps application on their N900's, as well as other OVI products like OVI Suite will not see any more improvements. Regardless of turn-by-turn navigation, things like not being able to save locations and the absence of an on screen keyboard makes the N900 version more like Cripple or Demo-ware. Certainly not a finished product.

For this I blame Nokia and not Maemo. In fact I blame Nokia for the whole OVI debacle with regard to Maemo. It's as if one side of their house has no idea about what the other side does. Or worse, someone like "Joe Isuzu" is running the marketing campaigns.

If the purpose of this was just to be able to say "Yup, the N900 has maps." then they could have saved us all a lot of space by just pointing to a preinstalled, JPG image of a map of the world or suttin' instead.
... it would be about as useful.

***

As someone said earlier, "How do we know M6 doesn't suck?"

Perhaps things like OVI and increased contributions from commercial developers will be better on Harmattan because areas of M6 will be less open to us...