It is step 5 of 5 - the fifth and last Maemo device (regardless of how it will be called on release). It will certainly (have to) be targeting the mainstream high end as it will have to replace both the niche N900 and the ill-fated N97. How you (or Nokia) treats the Maemo-to-MeeGo transition with regard to step count - that I have no idea about.

Let me repeat once more - MeeGo is not what you think it is. Nokia’s edition of MeeGo (that’s the one you want, with Flash and Skype and Maps and a store and whatnot) will appear somewhere mid-2011, and will likely target hardware way above the N900. I’m telling you, nothing would change, except for the title of the rant threads, we’d just go from "you have abandoned us" to "how much longer !!!" and then when it finally ships to "OMG we waited a year for THIS ?!?! It’s slow and totally unresponsive !!!". And few years of support is after that, sadly, pointless, no matter how good it sounds, tech simply advances too fast for it to make sense. Honest. Take a look at phones from 2007 and tell me - which one still receives updates (hint - the iPhone doesn’t and Android didn’t even have a shipping device back then). The problem with Nokia comms in my strictly personal opinion is that it did not gave a PROPER explanation of the reasoning and STILL hasn’t started explaining what MeeGo is and how it (along with the N9) fits the Nokia software strategy, letting people speculate - and since they have no sufficient info they speculate wrong more often than not.