Well this is agile development in the wild and planning so much ahead is not part of it.... *grin*

The fact that there are no answers speaks a lot, in good and bad. Things are planned, thought and implemented as we speak - and most of the people do not know what the future will entail and absolute answers - with commitments - can't be given.

This situation is rather unique in technology industry. Think about that. Nokia is doing really interesting things here, doing even the right things... but they can't produce a coherent and believable narrative about it. ( my longer rant about subject in my blog http://huima.wordpress.com/2010/02/1...ith-consumers/ )

But what they have created is a great piece of hardware. N900 - as it is now - is already a mighty machine and you can do a lot with it. I haven't yet decided whether I will keep my N900 or sell it forward, but I am looking forward next firmware updates and new software - as N900 has totally changed my expectations on mobile computing.

I see N900 as a great start towards mainstream after few revisions of pure geek and developer devices. But to appreciate N900 you really need to be a power user of online services, messaging and multimedia. I bought the device second hand with just few weeks of use from previous owner and as we speak dozen or so N900 are waiting to be sold in finnish online auctions by users who have used their new device only for a month or so and are now ready to move to Android or iPhone -- platforms with more mature consumer offering.

Mobile users, media and sales channels have been waiting for Nokia's answer to iPhone and N900 is not it, even though people who do not know sh*t try to categorize it as such. And therefore N900 is in really bad position. It is like Brian in The Life of Brian, guy who is just a regular nice fellow but who everyone thinks and wants to be the savior... and eventually the poor sob gets crucified and people sing a long 'Always think of the bright side of life'..

So.. My Expectations for the future are:

- Yes, you get to keep the great hardware you bought

- Yes, you will get firmware updates with incremental improvements to basic functionalities

- Yes you will get great small utilities from the community and from within Nokia in true open source fashion

... but

- No, there will not be cornucopia of new interesting and entertaining applications or games as people will not take the platform seriously compared to competition in consumer markets


This is linux.

You can ssh to your servers and open up openVPN tunnel to your company private network. You can run top and fsck, but do not expect to get new releases from EA or Gameloft.