...I love the N900. I can't wait to get one. In fact, our household will probably get 3 of them. But we aren't going to get one while there is so much uncertainty surrounding the N900 software. Maemo 5 updates ? Maemo 6 ? Meego ? Who knows ? And that is the problem. Who does know ? I'm sure someone at Nokia knows what is going on with the N900 software. But until that is CLEARLY communicated to the community and we see support and an upgrade path for the N900, I have no choice but to consider it a pre production idea (experiment ?) that somehow made it to production, which will soon be abandoned. <snip> ...something about how open source will some how save the planet or suttin' and gain the N900 a market share similar to Fedora's... </snip> ...
...It's not even clear what's part of the official Android distribution and what's been layered on by manufacturers to differentiate their phones. For example, the Droid runs a mostly stock version of Android 2.0 and partially supports Exchange Active Sync, a critical feature for business users. The Nexus One runs a stock version of Android 2.1, and has far more limited Exchange support with no ability to sync calendars. Other vendors like HTC have taken great pains to customize their devices with an added layer of interface customizations like Sense to both differentiate and simplify their devices, as well as implement missing features -- like full Exchange support. The problem is users of devices running Sense (or Motorola's Blur) find themselves stuck on older Android releases such as 1.5 or 1.6, which lack newer core features like Google Maps Navigation. I know that last weekend at least one Android enthusiast site reported that Google has promised to get 2.1 on every Android device. Well, that's all well and good and smiles and rainbows, but an unverified blog post from some Android enthusiasts isn't exactly canon to me. Are there hardware issues that will prevent 2.1 running on older devices? Screen resolutions? I recently tried to install one of the few good Android games and found it won't work on Nexus One as it has a nonstandard screen resolution. This isn't just about older devices either -- many new devices were announced at Mobile World Congress running either Android 1.5 or 1.6. When does it end? Either Google addresses the fragmentation issue immediately or it will find that Android suffers the same fate as Linux on the desktop.