I don't expect a new and high-end product to be released and working 100% perfect from day one. I can't release such software myself. But I expect a manufacturer to stand behind their product until the problems have been solved.

I have expensive DVD or Bluray players from very well-known companies that have required a couple of firmware updates until they got really great.

I have multimedia players that never got that final firmware update, in which case I have blacklisted the manufacturer and tell everyone around me to stay away from that brand.

The issue here is that Nokia as too few developers. So they have decided to move the resources to the N9, while ignoring the current N900 customer stock. That is an extremely stupid corporate decision.

I'm not planning to trade away my N900 because I have the skills to fool around inside it. But how likely am I to recommend a N900? How likely am I to buy a N9? How likely am I to productify some programs I develop for myself to broaden the availability of software for Nokia phones? Well, the amount of time Nokia spends on fixing their own mistakes greatly affects my decisions. And they most probably affects similar decisions by a lot of other N900 users. And we really need to make sure that every single day that the Nokia developers gets to work they know we exists and aren't happy with the current state. And we want those Nokia developers to send that message up in the hierarchy. And we want that same message fed to the Nokia help desks. We really want Nokia to start to consider it economically important to not just release a minimalistic 1.3 update but to show that Nokia either replaces bad products with working, or replaces bad software with good. But that the customer does get what Nokia does claim to sell. Nokia is #1. But that is a lonely place. And the application stores for iPhones and Androids are so well-filled.

It takes dedicated developers who believes in, and trusts, Nokia to get large amounts of commercial-grade applications for Maemo or Meego.

And it is similarly important that "normal" users who jumped the N900 band-wagon believes in Nokia. They see a lot of service packs to fix problems in Windows. They see bug-fixes every update tuesday.

With the N900, they do not see that quick lite update that gets hildon-home to stop consuming 5% CPU just because we have multi-level menues (which we just must have if we do use the phone as Nokia wants us - i.e. by adding more programs than just basic phone+calendar+sms).

We do not see any small updates that makes the kinetic scroll behave like it does in all other phones. We have to manually upgrade software while wondering how that upgrade will interfere with the upcomming PR13 update.

Whenever you do a comparison with Microsoft or Apple, people will not see the similarity but will instead think about the service updates that Nokia does not send out. All the trivial bugs that remains for month after month. All the trivial bugs what people thought should have been fixed in PR1.2 but that wasn't. Or maybe even thought would have been fixed in PR1.1.

Microsoft regularly sends out huge numbers of bugs. But they have a large number of people working with corrections too.

Nokia on the other hand has released a phone with beta software and have made the corporate decision to leave it with beta software. Except of course that we may possibly get non-beta software sometime if we throw away the original software and changes to Meego. But a change that Nokia officially claims to be an unofficial update - i.e. not for "normal" users. But once more - if I visit the normal phone store or a normal web shop, the phone is sold among the "normal" phones so many of the customers are expected to be "normal" customers - the kind of users who the Meego update is officially not intended for.

So in the end, we have corporate politics where the people who make the decisions about the software don't seem to synchronize with the people who markets the product. The end result is lost souls ending up here, and many of them asking "noob" questions they shouldn't have had to ask.

The cost for Nokia to dedicate one full-time developer just to incorporate and distribute minor fixes and to package the best improvements from this site into official updates would be very minor - or actually would be very much negative (as in a very big win) if considering goodwill.

Why have 500 users play with Swapolube? Why not have all N900 users getting optimized swap parameters from normal update? What cost would it be to add a simple GUI to add ignore directories for the tracker? Yes, people can solve it themselves, but once more - the cost of 500 people one-by-one reading up on the problem and fixing their problems, or every single N900 user getting a GUI with no need to have searched and read a lot of text here or themselves scanned through the directory structures on the phone?

If a single little developer at Nokia could manage a single little tiny bug/day and make it available in regular updates, it would represent a huge time/cost saving for the end users. The owners. The ones who have payed the phone and indirectly are paying the salaries of the Nokia staff.

Microsoft does have such developers. They do send out regular updates that saves time for a large number of users. Yes, they regularly goofs too, simplifying things too much, making advanced users have to spend time to figure out how to deactivate an unwanted automagic feature. But at least there is progress. Apple also have people constantly working on fixing broken things. And they both continue to fix broken things while busy with the next generation OS. And after that next generation OS has been released.

Nokia didn't sell the N900 with "warning. this is an experimental device. We may decide to ignore it and leave it in whatever state we find appropriate even if that means it in some situations will not manage basic functionality listed in our marketing material."

Nokia wants us to register or vote for bugs as if we all are developers. But are every N900 user also making sure that our problems (the ones we know are caused by Nokia bugs and not incompatibilities with 3rdparty applications or own changes) are reported to the Nokia support desks? If we don't then the help desk statistics will not show that there is problems. If we are too good at solving our problems, the N900 statistics will just show it as a very, very well-working phone and an example of a good software release policy.

In the short term, it's good for us that the members of this site finds solutions to N900 problems. But in the long term, we really have to make all of the Nokia organization realize that it's important with centralized support and that products shouldn't be abandoned until they have received mature software.