Dude... have you been to MySpace lately?

I oversimplified for sake of discussion. I think most of the posters here understood that.

There are badly behaved websites that violate one or more of the general rules for universal browser compatibility. Many are tailored to a specific browser and others will crash or hiccup on the content. For instance, there are some sites I have had to view with Firefox because IE6 and IE7 actually crash on them. I love the irony.

In addition, there have been times when it was my fault because I tried to force the issue, trying to get Opera to bring up pages that I knew contained "forbidden" content (like Flash 9). Some of this was due to testing, some due to curiosity.

Anyway, bottom line is that Opera hasn't crashed on me unless I deliberately forced it into areas it really (right, wrong or indifferent) isn't prepared to handle. On most sites, zero problems.

Sadly, that's not up to Nokia at all. It's up to the developers to code applications for their target audience.

If you want richer functionality, upgrade to the new tablet. If you want compatibility with your old software catalog, stay with the old tablet until your application catalog needs are met. Same holds true with Vista: If you want a prettier computing experience, upgrade to Vista. If you want to make sure all your programs work like they used to, don't do the upgrade. Yes, Microsoft broke a good handful of things with Vista (as with Windows 95 and 98 and XP) but the developers kept developing as long as it was sensible to do so to the target market.

Final opinion on this one: If you're upset that VNC doesn't work, ask for your money back for VNC. Oh wait...

Guess I wasn't referring to you then, tbutler.

EDIT: awesome post above Daniel.

So now it's the developer's responsibility that Nokia broke the APIs moving forward?

I must have ended up in BizzaroWorld without noticing.

Thank you for channeling the stereotypical glib response I've seen a thousand times before. I feel so much better now.

All of which is completely tangential to the thread topic: how long will the 770 remain a viable platform? As far as I can tell, your reply implies 'the 770's a dead-end platform, no future development, if you want new software suck it up and get an 800.' And I'm in agreement with some of the other posters here and on Ari jaaksi's blog - if this is the kind of 'support' we can expect from Nokia going forward, I'm not sure I want to plunk down another $400 less than a year after buying the 770. I expect a lot more out of a company...

...for example, Microsoft (much as I dislike them) supports running Vista on machines older than 14 months! OK, this is something of a straw man, since most of the reports say 'upgrade your machine to Vista at your peril, you really are better off getting it preinstalled.'

The ideal that I look to is OS X; I was able to install the newest 10.4 version when it was released on a stock G4 Cube, a machine pushing six years old at the time, and have it run with perfectly acceptable performance. Or to put it another way: although they made a large number of changes that would keep apps from running on older OS releases if developers took advantage of them, even with 10.4-specific apps they compensated by making it possible to install and run the new OS on older machines. And it was (and is) still quite easy to write applications that run unaltered on 10.4 all the way back through 10.1 (or even 10.0).

At some point, yes, it becomes impossible to move forward with older hardware. I understand that. I accept that. I don't expect Vista to run on a P3/800 with 128 MB RAM and a 10 MB drive. I also don't expect the OS to do things that are impractical given the hardware it's running on; I don't expect Aero Glass to run on year-old motherboard video, or Quartz Extreme to do all the fancy ripple effects on an ATI Radeon with 16 MB of VRAM. The issue here is when you cut off support; the 770 was the latest-and-greatest hardware less than a month ago, and I don't think it's too much to ask for Nokia to provide at least basic compatibility support for one hardware generation back.

And that is exactly what I'm concerned about. If developing for both platforms requires maintaining a separate codebase for each - even for a program that works identically on either platform, and makes no use of additional features in OS 2007 or the 800 - then how long will it be 'sensible to do so' for the 770? Application support for OS 2005 certainly seemed to dry up pretty quickly.

I expect more than 14 months of development support for a computing platform. Even if you treat the 770 as a closed consumer-level gadget, it's still a shabby way to treat your customer base; if Apple were to say "we're changing the song format at the iTunes store with our newest iPods, if you want to continue buying music from us you have to buy a new iPod," would you consider that acceptable, even if you could still play your old songs on your old iPod? Would the general public consider that acceptable? I sure don't think so... Microsoft certainly got royally castigated for screwing all the PlaysForSure users with the Zune ecosystem.

tbutler: Consumer Electronics have a much shorter lifespan than computers. Do you expect the games you downloaded on your old phone to work on your new phone? Especially all the FREE ones?

Would it be unreasonable for Nokia to implement a policy of supporting the last two Internet Tablet devices with full parity?

That is to say Nokia would currently be supporting the 770 and N800, ideally both on OS 2007 (with the exception of closed source apps and hardware differences). If OS 2008 is released this should become available for the 770 as well.

Then, when/if the N900 is introduced (maybe mid to late 2008?) support for the 770 will be reduced to security only fixes, and would remain forever on it's last OS release (either OS 2007 or possibly OS 2008).

Given the above policy, we would all know where we stand and could buy Internet Tablet devices safe in the knowledge we would be receiving at least one year of full support and Nokia lovin'.

I understand that Nokia don't want the overhead of supporting numerous hardware platforms, but it shouldn't be that hard to support the current and previous platforms. In fact, the OS2007 backporting appears to be going quite smoothly suggesting the differences aren't that huge and could, in theory, be supported going forward thus implementing the above support policy.

This ain't rocket science.

If you guys recall, in CES, Ari mentioned that they didn't abstract APIs from hardware, so backporting is not easy, but hopefully in future Nokia will do that (for newer generations, of course)

Nokia was in a rush to introduce N800 and they never thought about API compatibility with 770 when working on N800.

This has been a very poor and immature approach for a company that has a long history in providing support for their phones.

The issue is not affordability (at least for some of us); it's about loosing trust in a company that intentionally (evil) or unintentionally (idiotic) drops support for its last generation of a device.

Now going back to 770 support, would Nokia continue to fix bugs in and enhance features of OS2006 with the same priority as of those in OS2007 for N800? If not (most likely), then they're screwing their customers, big time.

Daniel, would you like to go back to your Toyota analogy but for servicing a 2007 Camry vs. a 2006 one? Following Nokia, maybe Toyota should stop servicing last year’s cars.

As professionals, let’s be objective; is that hard to do?

Great post iFrank. I'm going to make more of an effort to be objective. I admit I let certain history and pride affect my thoughts when I've seen posts like tbutler's above. While we're striving toward objectivity, can we ALL dispense with the sarcasm and slams as well? I can't see that nastiness helping any situation other than the salvation of egos.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be sarcastic and offend anyone.

IMO, having OS2007 on 770 would be nice and makes development much more efficient for both devices, but it's not a must.

What is required though is supporting 770 OS2006 (i.e. bugs and stability issues) along with OS2007 on N800. 770 is only 1 year old (a little more) and Nokia still sells it; then, it should get adequate support.

Of course, if someone needs extra storage, more CPU power and such, then, they should upgrade to N800; it's normal and fair to do so; but no one should be forced or asked to upgrade, because of bugs in 770 OS bundle; that would be ripping off owners.