Haven't said anything on this issue. Been carefully digesting what everyone has been saying since yesterday. And was waiting to see whether I would wake up today and find out it was all a bad dream. Unfortunately this was not the case.

Reading through the many threads on this issue it seems there are two groups:

1. Those who are extremely disappointed and feel that this is the end of Nokia.
2. Those who feel Nokia was going to die and this may give it a life line.

1. I fall into category 1. Within that category there are those blind fan boy who in all the time I have been on this forum would attack anyone who dared to criticise anything Nokia did or criticise the N900.

Although I fall into category 1 I distance myself from this class of category 1. I recognised that Nokia had completely fallen behind and was disappointed that they had allowed Apple to come and take over the mobile sphere. However, I saw the potential in Maemo if it was given special attention and all the bugs fixed so it could be used by the mass market (rather than those who want to spend ages on a tech forum just trying to get basic functionality out of a $600 device). I thought Meego was going to be the realisation of that.

I am very very disappointed that meego is now dead. Undoubtedly the N900 is going to be my very last Nokia device. It is the end of an era because in the 11 years I have had a mobile my mobile has always been Nokia (beginning way back with the 3330 and ending with the N900).

Nokia is now totally dead to me. I have already dipped into the android arena with the Galaxy Tab and my next mobile will surely now be an android phone (probably by HTC).

2. Those in category 2 I applaud for appreciating that Nokia was in trouble.

However I completely fail to see how they think this is a solution.

The only winner in this is Microsoft.

It is clear that if you are simply a windows phone hardware manufacturer the profit margins are going to be very very small. The only way Nokia will be able to get remotely close to its current level of profits from symbians massive sales is by totally killing R&D budget and by laying off tons of staff. On a human level none of us should see this as a good solution.

Even after killing R&D and cutting jobs I still don't see how Nokia is going to profit much from this. People here always say Nokia makes great hardware but really what does that mean? I think they are great in call reception (and the continued sales of the iphone 4 also shows that people are not that bothered by such things).

In what other way can we say Nokia are great in hardware? Certainly not in looks. The HTC Desire has been out for ages and yet looks a million times better than the N8 which just came out. The N900 looks like a black brick. Some may like that but not the mass market. Windows Phones 7 are all the same in terms of functionality. So how many would really look at a Nokia W7 phone and pick it over those from HTC or Samsung. Apart from fanboys I suspect very very few.

Is it in hardware durablity? After having my usb N900 port fall out I am certainly not going to make that suggestion.

Is it the fact that they have 32gb internal memory plus sd card? If I recall W7 phones don't even support external sd cards and Nokia has recently been using 16gb anyway.

So if hardware alone is not going to make people always choose Nokia over HTC or Samsung exactly how do those supporting this move think it is going to make Nokia as much money as they are now? I just don't see it.

What I see is Microsoft buying Nokia for peanuts in a couple of years. If that happens and turns out that was always Elop and Microsoft's plan can they be sued for fraud or something? Surely they should not be allowed to get away with such evil business practices.