Nice to see a good discussion, and I admit that you all make some good points that I did not think about while posting. Having said that, I do have some thoughts...

jaark, do you want to compare Nokia and Google? True, Google don't have a large presence on the smart phone market, but they are just starting...

Also, what is this stuff about the "core Windows kernel"? I think that comparing hardware and software companies is flawed logic... Instead of Windows, you should say MacOS.

c0rt3x, I have hope but not faith.

Do you all think that Nokia would be where it is on the smartphone market if it had a single phone model for each Symbian version?

I'm pretty sure Nokia is bigger than Google? Or has google overtaken nokia in 2009?

How old is Unix? Matters none.

Fast moving market, they should have established themselves by now. Android is how old? And it's market share is doing what?

Stay on topic. I was talking about solely Maemo. Thanks.

Google is huge, at any rate. Google, not Android. And they're agressive.

WinMo was mentioned. Windows Mobile hasn't gotten anything going for itself in a lot of years. But I can't honestly say I think they've been trying very hard. Now, Android. Consider where Android was three years ago.

Android has a lot of momentum. A lot. WinMo has none. Maemo has some.

Rising

..Also rising

It depends on how you measure size. I am no economist, so I may be wrong. I just looked at "Market Value", here:

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/18/...00_MktVal.html

toyota is number one selling car, yet I do not buy a toyota.

methinks that with the projected numbers of smartphones in the future there is PLENTY of room for multiple OSes.

This is not winner take all. Maemo will live long and prosper, as will Android.

Nokia is a much bigger company than you think.

I was pointing out how flawed your argument about number of companies 'investing' in the android platform was. By 'investing' I took to mean having a direct role in producing so that would be Google, HTC and amsung (maybe a couple more smaller players) vs Nokia. I was pointing out that the number of companies directly involved does not really factor in many circumstances.

Each model does have an almost unique version of Symbian, with things customised and optimised for the individual device. There is nothing in Nokia's history to suggest that major Maemo versions will be unique o a particular hardware release - that wasn't even the case with previous NITs, the 770 had several OSs (and then the community supported 'Hacker Edition') as did the N800 and N810.

This is the first iteration of moving Maemo onto this class of device. I'm pretty sure that they went through similar rapid development and growing pains when they transitioned their high-end phones from whatever they called the software that ran the 'feature phones' to Symbian based smartphones.

I do think he underestimates Maemo, but can't say his wrong either.
If there is a company who can make it looking the marketshares, it's Nokia thought.
I would say it really doesn't matter how many devices there is, but again good thing to remember here is that Maemo won't be alone in the future as it got friends from Symbian Foundation that probally will keep it's number one status till Qt loving Symbian^4 comes out.

The only reason why the Iphone 2G is still getting support is because it has identical hardware as the 3G, apart from 3G of course. It will be interesting to see what happens after summer; if Iphone is ever going to support multi-tasking, then the support for the older models has to be dropped.

Keeping the same software for a wide range of devices either unables to make use of the new hardware, or slow down the older ones with the new power-demanding improvements - both of these cases can be experienced with the Iphone family.


As for Android, exclusivity deals is to blame. Some OEM:s, like SE (which supports various platforms unlike Motorola, which is devoted to Google nowadays), didn't have a choise but 1.x in 2009 - yet some Motorola devices had 2.0 already at the time.

Actually it's SE:s fault that their prototype (X10) never became a consumer-friendly handset within reasonable time - but still, with 10s of devices announced for 2010 with older initial versions still to be released, support can't be dropped.

As of the exclusivity deals, I really wonder what Google offered to satisfy all bigger players (including PC OEM:s) but Nokia, Apple, Palm and RIM.