True, Harmattan was never promised. What was disconcerting was that a large number of legitimate bugs / issues that were prevalent in Maemo 5 were pushed to Harmattan. You can track the bug submissions. Disappointing. Usually people do that at the end of a product cycle of at least a year or two. This was done after months.

Not a good track record for support.

While at the same time MeeGo gets announced that will superceed Maemo 6 / Harmattan / (soon to be called MeeGo 1.0).

So while the world only had Maemo 5 and 6 there was some potential that the support life of Maemo 5 would extend more than just a few months. With the advent of MeeGo (Maemo + Moblin) and them just renaming Maemo 6 to MeeGo 1.0 the likelihood of support for Maemo 5 for the next year is just wishful thinking at this point.

I don't know if this was speculation but we were told that a lot of people on the Maemo team have moved to MeeGo. Not a surprise really. Great, for MeeGo. Sucks to be us.

I hate harping on this but Adobe 10.1 which was promised so long ago and was a huge selling point is still not available and there is no indication that Nokia will deliver it. I think that is a good indication of the level of commitment they have for Maemo 5. We knew that Maemo 5 was rough around the edges but the goal was to iterate it and make it better. Now they're just putting it on life support.

If Nokia said, "Don't worry we will continue to support Maemo 5 with updates and feature enhancements for the next year or two" I think many would not be so concerned about having Harmattan (MeeGo 1.0). But that's not going to happen. Nokia is trying to get out Symbian ^3 and ^4 AND also going to support Maemo 5 and 6 (MeeGo 1.0) and MeeGo (Maemo + Moblin)? Nokia is a big company but not that big and not in todays competitive world.

Short of Nokia re-dedicating publicly to the Maemo product the only option left for us to make sure that we have support that lasts more than a few months and so Maemo 6 / MeeGo 1.0 is our shot at lasting support.

If the delays in 1.2 are any indication, Nokia has deprecated the N900 and Maemo 5 and put it on the back burner of support. I can go on all day about how hard it is to make these releases but I would bet you good money if people hadn't left for MeeGo the delay would surely not have been a long.

I'm not saying that focusing on MeeGo is a bad decision. I just want to make sure that we get the right level of attention and right now jumping on the MeeGo bandwagon is the only way we'll get a little love from Nokia. I'd love to be proven otherwise.