Thread: Maemo 6 and/or MeeGo on N900: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
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anonym is offline anonym
2010-02-21 , 00:04
Posts: 11 | Thanked: 5 times | Joined on Dec 2009
#55
Stskeeps,
I really wanted to be persuaded by this post, but I don't feel reassured at all. Let's go through the list of questions you say we should be asking:

Originally Posted by Stskeeps View Post
  • Will Nokia as a hardware vendor continue to provide drivers for N900 for MeeGo and Maemo 6? (Will they devote resources to do this or help community to do this themselves)
This seems to be an unkown. If Nokia would explicitly pledge long term driver support, I'd feel a little better.

Originally Posted by Stskeeps View Post
  • Do you trust that the community is capable of producing a production quality MeeGo or Maemo 6 for N900, if it had technical assistance by Nokia for driver issues? And would you use it?
Production quality? I have my doubts... It certainly won't be possible if Nokia doesn't provide all the drivers, right? In any case, if the community can make MeeGo run on N900, doesn't that prove beyond all doubt that Nokia could have done it themselves? It sure feels like they're dropping support to save on development costs and force hardware upgrades. This isn't just an annoyance to N900 users, it's also a terrible idea from a business perspective -- this is no way to build momentum and loyalty for the platform.

Originally Posted by Stskeeps View Post
  • Will applications coded for MeeGo/Maemo6 be possible to build for Maemo5 with little effort?
I'm sure they will. Does that justify package-incompatibility between Maemo 5 and Harmattan? They've done this with every Maemo major release, and it needs to stop. What kind of "platform" requires every package to be modified/rebuilt for each significant OS revision? Certainly none of the desktop OSs, and not the iPhone. As someone said on Ari's blog comments, "It's going to take a long time to catch up to the iPhone's 140,000 apps if our total keeps getting reset back to zero every 6-18 months. The best way to obtain lasting user- and developer-loyalty is through platform stability and long-term support."

Originally Posted by Stskeeps View Post
  • Will Nokia be using the cross-platformness of MeeGo APIs to bring their software stack to all Nokia devices running the MeeGo platform (community or vendor-originated)?
Ari already said that OVI maps navigation isn't coming to N900. Maybe it could work via a community port of MeeGo, but Nokia won't be making any effort to ensure that it does.

Are my concerns all invalid? Please, I sincerely want to be convinced, but as it stands I just can't see buying another Nokia.
 

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