While writing this post dissecting the reasons why people are unhappy with N900 and Nokia in general, it got me started thinking. We have a situation where Nokia is unlikely to put too much resource into N900 moving forwards because it is not worth them doing it (or so they think, even though I disagree). So this is just a thought experiment to see if an alternate model exists.

So the exam question is

Would you pay Nokia between £1(€1/$1.5) to £5, dependent on the features, say every 6 months if they promise to bring you a firmware update which brings it at par with the corresponding Meego release? It could be a subscription model or pay to download.

The logic is of course reasonably straightforward. We do know that Nokia sold 100,000 N900s in the first 5 weeks of release, so there are probably at least 300k-400k N900 owners out there, if not more. So even if say 20% of those agree to pay for the firmware update, that would mean that Nokia can hire 2-4 full time developers to maintain and port features to the N900 (and possibly to older Maemo devices). Question of course is whether such a model is feasible and would customers pay for it? (I know there are issues around piracy etc., but let us not go there yet)