Thanks for such an insightful post, michaelalanjones. I had a Z too before the digitizer on the screen died, and it's definitely a familiar scene here with the 770. There is more interaction from the corporation that put out the product, but it's still fragmented and somewhat "unofficial"-- people get replies to their questions depending on how busy the developers are and so forth.

Most people spend a lot of time struggling with the platform-specific details instead of developing apps, much like Z; they always require more customization than you might think. Thus you end up with a handful of overworked, skilled coders maintaining some of the larger applications and a million unmaintained, semi-functional smaller apps. It also doesn't help that Nokia has taken the stance that a lot of the really exciting possibilities like BT keyboards, USB host, and PIM apps are not officially sanctioned (If you break it, you get to keep both pieces!). It would be great to see an official roadmap of sorts, kind of like the Mozilla team did as far as desired features, timelines for releases, etc. I'd really like to see some effort put forth by Nokia to try and make porting applications easier-- less Hildon/Maemo, more plain GTK/X. Silly things like not showing an icon for non-Hildon apps or having an esoteric approach to keyboard input really kill the enthusiasm when someone is trying to get up to speed on the platform.

My worst fear is that like all the other Linux PDA companies (Agenda, Sharp, etc.) we'll have a short window of active development before the corporate backing disappears, leaving us with an orphaned device and no clear path for progress. We then get to start all over again when the next vendor comes out with the Foo-3000 PDA-like device that runs a non-standard version of the Bar-Tk++ toolkit. The 770 has a lot of potential and I really hope that we can actually get a larger community of developers involved in spite of users flaming (You know who are) and the stability issues experienced. It really seems like a pivotal time to me now. People are starting to lose their enthusiasm for the device as the honeymoon period is over, Nokia's gone silent about any more releases in the short term, and the overall pace of development and discussion (Aside from complaining) has declined. I would hope that things will improve, but we really need some more feedback and interaction from Nokia.

Just my 2c,
Larry