I think that the N900 is a more commercial product than the previous tablets, as it has the telephony feature. I think Nokia had a hard time designing marketing just right, so that ordinary phone users that would be more happy with, say Android wouldn't think of the N900 as an equivalent. On the other hand, there's no point in Nokia marketing the N900 as a "don't buy if you want to do this, that and this" product, but rather as building on the N900's strengths. This is only natural for marketing strategies, of course.

I think the most fustration comes from exactly those people, who weren't prepared to truly face and accept the shortcomings of the N900 as a phone. I think this is one source of fustration that then surfaces on these forums as negative posts.

Other sources of this fustration on the other hand, might be the people who understood exactly what the N900 was, and can't stand misinformed people whining over something that's self-explanatory to them. These people are also often the people most content with their device, and so hearing people whining about it can be somewhat hard to take.

The general tech-junkie who might get along with the idea that the N900 is more a computer might also value the fact that he holds the latest and greatest technology in his posession. Therefore for him announcements like the ones about MeeGo not coming for the N900 might hit hard in a very negative way.

Then there's the overall "this vs that" mentality that exists very strongly in our "smartphones popularized" era, where expensive devices have become much more respected and sought after items. As people pay more money for their devices, the slightest shortcomings really seem to have an impact on them, and functions and features are compared almost to a neurotic degree. This situation is then bloated by (false) expectations created by very large-scale marketing by the leading manufacturers, who naturally want to pit their devices against everyone else's as the best. This is again, the most natural part of marketing.

To make sense of the chaos that results from comparing numerous manufacturers' devices and OS's to eachother, people often form fanhood relationships to some companies, devices or OS's. Challenge these and again the results might be very negative.

So what would I suggest that should be done to maintain a healthy and constructive community? Well, there's nothing we can all decide upon that will make everything allright. There will always be posts that are posted before reading a thousand other posts that would have significantly changed the contents of that post. There's no way of controlling someone coming in from the already established common-knowledge base inside this community.

Therefore everyone has to decide for themselves, how they want to present themselves and their case when confronted by differing views. One must decide, if a constructive reply is something they can achieve, even when facing statments that seem completely unplausible and destructive to them. Sometimes simply not replying can be the most constructive thing to do.

Perhaps the responsibility then falls hardest upon frequent and oldest users of these boards and older members of this community to attempt to not "feed the trolls" and "throw gasoline on the flames" once things heat up. This is also the hardest kind of responsibility, because having stuck around for the longest time might mean that they are the die-hardest enthusiasts.


Just my 2 cents in the form of Social theory on the Maemo community!