More than a year before the release of the N900, Nokia announced that the Maemo 5 to Maemo 6 transition would bring a fundamental change, a switch from GTK to Qt. While it's certainly disappointing that Nokia has continued their tendency to not provide polished, officially supported releases of new Maemo versions for past Maemo devices, they didn't hide the fact that major changes were looming in Maemo's future.

At Maemo Summit 2009, prior to the release of the N900, Nokia even announced that Maemo 6's UI would assume the presence of a multitouch, capacitive screen. So, we knew Maemo 6 would bring major changes, and we knew we had received only murky, at best mixed, signals as to whether Maemo 6 might ever run on the N900. The surprise that followed the release of the N900 was that the marketing folks had decided to relabel "Maemo 6" as "MeeGo 1.0N".

What's in a name? Even Nokia's own (non-marketing) employees have an amusing tendency to still call Harmattan "Maemo 6".