Thread: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
View Single Post
tbutler@mac.com is offline tbutler@mac.com
2010-08-06 , 19:19
Posts: 11 | Thanked: 8 times | Joined on Jul 2006
#203
It's a long story but basically:

Nokia will not officially support MeeGo on n900.
Community is doing port and some Nokia employees are lending a hand too.
Drivers for n900 are still closed but community are writing open source versions (e.g. battery management)
MeeGo for n900 is till very immature. The next release is due in October and will have a gui (maybe very basic version but feature complete?)
Nokia know full well that if other venders join the MeeGo bandwagon, then their job becomes a lot more competitive on that front. Nokia became complacent, they were top dog and didn't/don't put R&D or customer upgrade paths in the places where their customers really want it. This is something that will drastically alter their hand now with MeeGo. They will have to continually be the best to keep on top, Android and Apple aside.
This, among the other reasons I've stated, is why I believe there are so many people feeling abandoned, and refer to the N900 as a dead platform. And in this, I can't disagree with them. I have my own reservations, as I expressed, about the future - even of MeeGo - because of those hardware components and the legal issues you are referring to. As long as Nokia holds the chains on those (whether they want to or not is not my point) - then when Nokia leaves the platform MeeGo will be that much more difficult, or suddenly need to be made illegal, to port any of the newer community builds or future MeeGo versions because the "blobs", as you call them, can no longer be obtained from Nokia.
...you know, I dropped by for the first time in forever after running across the link in my bookmarks, just to see what was up with a device line I used to love. And the first thing that struck me, after reading this? It's just like the 770 days, when Nokia dropped new OS support after a year and a half. Loud complaints and feelings of betrayal from many users, promise of a 'community-supported' release of the new OS, hacked to try and get around closed driver binary blobs and the like. (In the end, I stuck with the last 'official' release instead of the hacked one, at least it was more stable.) Complaints about Nokia taking things for granted, including their customers. Internet Tablet supporters defending their ability to hack/customize the device, the greater capabilities it gave tech geeks, the openness.

For me, at least, that history drives my reaction to this. I was burned by Nokia once. I gave them another chance when I found a N800 on CompUSA liquidation. And that's been it, really. I updated to OS2008, but I passed on the 810 and the 900. And over time, I stopped using my ITs; the only really first-class application I used was fbreader, and superiority as an e-reader didn't compensate for the state of the rest of the software library.

If you've been burned once, you tend to remember that. Now Nokia is apparently going through the same series of events, yet again; will the results be different this time? A lot of people were hopeful and willing to forgive Nokia for its behavior with the 770, but will they this time? How many times will users accept this kind of treatment from Nokia? How long will they be able to continue as a company, if they continue treating users this way?
 

The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to tbutler@mac.com For This Useful Post: