Yup... and this is very likely a hardware/firmware based issue. This would happen with any device using this chipset, and reality is that Nokia is probably not the one making firmware for the chip. I have an old 11b 16-bit PCMCIA card that has the same issue from Netgear. No support from them either. If the chip supplier won't provide firmware updates, you can hardly blame Nokia for not fixing it. It would be like blaming the local gas station owner for not stocking lead based gas for you 1940 car, despite the fact that nobody makes it any more.

That's just not true. How many people are still using their N700s? I see active discussions about people installing mapper and back porting things for it. Reality is you at least have the option to update it (within reasonable expectations) after "normal" support has moved on to the next new device.

On the N900, the only major items that aren't open are the Wifi, GPS and bluetooth stacks, which have a well defined API in a functional subsystem. That's true on every phone made today, iPhone included. Outside of that you can replace every piece of "closed" stuff with an open source alternative, from the browser to the media player to the desktop and the OS.

Yes, if you want to keep the same look and feel, and stick with 100% supported "stable" Nokia stuff, you'll hit a wall. Open source gives you the flexibility to move well beyond what you could do with an iPhone though. Can you over-clock an iPhone? No. Can you multi-task on an iPhone? No, not even with 4.0. Could you do MMS the first year the iPhone was out? No. You can do all that with the N900 mere months after it was made available. If there's something you don't like, you can look at the source, and the very open and available API set, and fix 99% on your own. Something you can't do with an iPhone, not even an jail-broken one.

And let's be honest. The N700/800 were toys for people that had the money to spend on such things. They were really hot PDAs, which frankly have even less of a shelf life or support cycle than phones (just ask a Palm user...) The N900 has out-sold all of the NX00 series combined in under 6 months. It's playing by a slightly different set of rules based on sheer numbers alone.

I for one am quite happy N900 is opensource. It does everything I need it to and some things I didn't know I needed it to do. If I need some key thing done, I have been able to hack something together to make it work on my own. I don't need to pay annually for a developer kit, or publish my app in Nokia's store front, or update the apps key every 3 months. I don't need to worry about what happens if Nokia doesn't like my app, or pulls it from the store, or stops supporting my phone on their store, or stops providing their development kit. I have it all archived, and there are no time-outs or phone-home mechanisms to disable anything, no broken DRM systems to go bad.

Btw, ALL of the above applies to iStuff. You need to pay annually for a devel kit, apps timeout after 3 months if not from the store (even devel code), and if Apple dislikes your app, it doesn't get into the app store, or can get pulled at any time. The devel system also phones home and times out, so when Apple decides to stop supporting Gen1s, you're hosed. No more changes. You can't even code a new app for your old phone and push it a little more, because your devel setup will have timed out, no store push will exist, and the DRM will stop you from installing (short of jailbreaking, which may or may not work at that point.)

So, there are clear advantages to the N900 being as open source as it is. If you disagree that's great, but frankly it's just ignorance on your own part, as the above examples show. For you, these things may not be important... for most iPhone users it's not, because they like being sheep. They like being told they need to close one app to open another, and that they can't replace their own battery. And when they disable Gen1 iPhones and turn off the app store for it, they'll all go "baaahh!" and line up to get the iPhone 4 to replace it, assuming they haven't already.