I bought my N900 because I was under the impression the closest thing out there to a real open-source phone. Not from any misguided GNU-style ideas about "Freedom", but from first-hand experience that the combination of solid hardware (something Nokia is very good at) and open-source software results in excellent products (e.g., Logitech Squeezebox).

I know that the reason for this is that when anyone with the skills can hack on a piece of software and "scratch their itches", the small-but-highly-irritating bugs get quickly fixed (e.g. RSS widget using data all the time, email widget doesn't notice that emails are read, phone UI glitches in PR1.2) and simple features get quickly implemented (e.g. ReplayGain in media player, recurring tasks in calendar, info on lock screen, portrait VKB).

I feel like I've been hit by a bait-and-switch scam with the N900. It was sold as an open-source, Linux phone that doesn't hide it's Linux roots that's capable of doing anything a computer can do. Turns out, none of that is really true. Important parts are closed-source, and even for the open-source bits there's no good way to scratch your itches - there are only monolithic releases, and they're so far between that the feedback loop is just so long that there's almost no hope that a fix committed today will ever actually make it to your phone.

And it's not like the community isn't willing to put in the effort to fix bugs and write features. The Maemo community has added an amazing amount of value to the N900 - from headphoned to fMMS - but a lot of these efforts are stymied by Nokia at every step. A perfect example is Erminig-NG: lorelei has pretty much single-handedly implemented Google Calendar sync (a much-requested feature which has been essentially ignored by Nokia!), but it's useless for most people because Calandar doesn't really support recurring events and it's closed-source so we can't fix it. Or just think about how much better fMMS would be if we could actually fix the whole APN mess.

So a lot of people have bought N900s thinking that due to it's open-source nature, the community would be able to address these sorts of issues. And then Nokia says, "No, only we can make those sorts of changes". And now you're surprised that everybody's clamouring for Nokia to make changes?

Sorry, this probably isn't the best place for this rant. But I had to get it off my chest. Maybe I should start a blog.

[edit] Forgot to say: what really hurts, is that the N900 is still the closest thing to my idea of a perfect, open-source phone. Every advantage it had over the competition when I bought it a year ago it still has. It's still got the fastest CPU that Nokia has ever put in a phone, it's still got one of the best hardware keyboards and Maemo is still the least consumer-hostile mobile OS I've ever seen. What other phone can you download a completely unrestricted flashing tool for, straight from the manufacturer? Yet so many people want to make it better, and are continuously frustrated that they can't, and even more frustrated that there's no where else to go.

People aren't this angry (or at least not this kind of angry) with Apple, Palm or Microsoft: everyone knows that when you buy an iPhone, your user experience is dictated (for better or worse) by Steve Jobs. Customers who bought the N900 explicitly eschewed that option and made a different choice. But then they find they just choose a different dictator - perhaps a less totalitarian dictator, but still a dictator. So yeah, anger...