Just want to start by saying I am a cynical person by nature, but my many years experience in the IT industry do give me some fairly educated and realistic expectations and insight into what is likely or not likely to happen.

* I have an N810

* I'm interested to see and use Mer or any other growing OS that will open up avenues for developers of the latest applications to run on my device. I am also interested in some more flexibility, especially the ability to replace the OS, file system and all applications onto the larger storage media built-in.

* I'm willing to contribute with testing anything that is worked on, including applications and OS builds.

* If any of the aforementioned would happen, I would then be able to continue using my N810 instead of finding its usefulness dwindle more and more by the day.

Please understand I really love what has been accomplished but there's no way I will upgrade to an N900, not because I don't want to get farther in the abilities my tablet can offer me, but rather because I think it has become predictable what will happen. The next product will eventually come out, and it will be incompatible with previous products, and therefore the same cycle will happen again - developers coding for the latest and greatest, but unfortunately nothing can run on the earlier product!

I have spent the past 6 months looking around for useful applications for my tablet. Recently I started to find many new apps hit the scene and I was so happy to see them until I discovered they're only for N900 and that they cannot run on my N810. The same handful of products are available for my N810 as had been a year ago and absolutely no further development has been made for my N810. Anyone who is developing is doing so for the newest, and the N8x0 are left to collect the dust.

I fear this will happen again with the N900 once Nokia comes up with something new. The reason being if everything developed for the newest product could also run on the older models, they cannot extort the community into buying their newest product.

I think you'll likely see a huge number of users move over to the IPad and whatever competing products arise on the market.

As much as I am fond of the open-source nature of this device, the fact is most of the applications I have from my old Windows CE devices still run on my latest Windows Mobile 6.5. Despite the fact that its all about money in the closed-source industry, at least I don't face extinction with every new OS version the way it is with this device. Really a shame because open source should be as backward compatible as possible, and instead I see tons of apps available for N900 that cannot be run on my N810.