That would be great, but in my opinion will not happen. Nokia is fighting hard enough to stonewall users, and there's like a million of us. If they had a direct channel for people to ask questions, they couldn't ignore us or release a two-sentence post where they sum it up as "no".

If they had a public board where they promised to give answers, how would they ignore questions like "what is taking so long with 1.2? I thought you said you had a team on it.", and "what's up with no Meego" (not that I really care, I want Fremantle patched up, thanks), or "do you really think we forgot you promised us that the device is beta when we bought it and that you will fix it and add functionality later".

Right now, silence is the best shield they have. No promises means they can nix whatever they find to be too hard to do at any time without people up in a bunch.

I have suggested something similar before, but I know too well that it's only going to be a wet dream. And even if it isn't, what would a coding team say? They would work for Nokia and if Nokia doesn't release info before etcetcetc then there is nothing TO say.

None of these dialogue suggestions will work until Nokia will make the move to open up and admit mistakes, limitations, lack of resources, whatever is keeping stuff back.

I'll admit openly that I know little about Linux. But I've been in the IT business one way or another for almost 20 years. I know how an OS works, I know how a driver works, I know what a hardware abstraction layer is and I am NOT buying any reason why future OSs don't run on older hardware.

If I can change my PC hardware 7 times under the same OS and change the OS 7 times on the same hardware, there's no reason to be unable to get ARM Linux running on an ARM.

And that's why Nokia is quieter than a fish in a church. Would you want to answer that? What would you say? It's hard and we already have your money?

I like that you're cautiously optimistic. Someone has to offset me. This isn't my first Nokia. I've said it before, I'll say it again. My N80 still has bugs. And not transdimentional bugs, that only happen every now and then when the moon is full. No, reproducible, across-several-devices, right-there-in-contacts bugs.

Now I've depressed myself :P