It's the 7th most popular phone on Amazon.com right now, 56th overall in Cell Phones & Services. I think only the (subsidized?) BB9700, Droid and unlocked BBCurve are ahead of it as far as smartphones go.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers...3?ie=UTF8&pg=3

By availability AND by lack of sales promotion in some regions.

Around 20th of December 2009 I was hunting for one in Belgium and the few webshops featuring it all had it on backorder.
Downtown in 3 cities other than the captital I have visited 7 of the regular phone shops I found no one aware of the existence. With huge iPhone logo's on the background I had to stand corrected that N900 was nothing from Nokia and that in the Nokia range N97 was the latest and greatest.
Only one of the visited shops said that it must be an internet tablet, none of them said anything about backorders.
Januari 17th I bumped into it in a phone shop connected to a supermarket.
The sales person tolde me he had 2 in stock, sold none and that it was a different operating system, sold me one.

never trust google trends:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=n900%...ate=ytd&sort=0
changed your overview from "nokia n900, apple iphone, google nexus one, n97" to "n900, apple iphone 3gs, google nexus one, nokia n97" and you see a totally different chart.
you could leave out nokia -> more hits
leave out apple and 3gs -> more hits
leave out google and one -> more hits..

It's interesting how different things look when you omit the manufacturer's name from the search queries. A more natural way of searching:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=+n900...ate=ytd&sort=0

I hope the next "manufacturer" who attempts to build a device like the n900 won't be Nokia. They are not able to manage such platforms.

Now this is sad:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=maemo...ate=ytd&sort=0

That can't be right. Something's screwy.

Reading down 100 posts, few would question the credibility of Gartner. Because Fortune 500 are Gartner's customers and because it's a big name it should be the source we can trust. But the truth may not be that comfortable.

For some reason I've been reading full paid Gartner reports and I must say those reports are good to people who wants to get a picture of the area whom are not familiar with. However, that's more or less about it, and that's why financial sectors like Reuters replies on Gartner, because they're exactly the group of people who need to look at the trends of those area they're not, and will never familiar with.

The fact is Gartner always fail to get close to real trend in technological things in their speculation. Here I listed some of the incorrect speculations that I recall from my volatile memory:

1) Linux can never go to mainstream
- Desktop may be, but llook at the mobile, computer appliance (esp. network equipment), and all kind of servers(esp web servers). Gartner was totally, completely wrong on this.
2) Opensource can never drive the economy because it's...well, free.
- they seem to forget about the competitive factors in OS movement
3) GPL's legal ground is questionable and this fact should hammer its corporate adoption
- quite like the opposite; look like Gartners is also bad at giving legal advises
4) The lawsuit raised against Linux communities (by SCO, namely) will eventually reverse the trends of the growing adoption of Linux
- never happen, and SCO has filed chapter 11 long time ago

And even up to now, Gartner has never ever given positive speculation on opensource, GPL, linux and the like, because, as you can imagine, they're not, and never will be, their customers.

The sales numbers for the N900 are more than likely from Nokia's point of view seen in reference to the N800 and N810 sales. When compared with the intended market of the device its sales probably are much more proportional.

Last year the iPhone only held 14% of the market share, vs Nokia's 47% of smart phone sales. According to Gartner. And many sources indicating Nokia will remain firmly in place as the lead smart phone vendor, with rim actually out pacing apple with a present first quarter of 19.1% over apples 16% market share.

So the way I look at it Nokia has done a good job, they provide enough smartphones [the intended competitor to the iPhones] to hold a huge lead over all there competitors, while still providing the opertunity to users like most of us to use a truely unique device like the N900 [and the N family in general]. Which companies like apple, rim and even google haven't been bold enough to do.

Keep in mind the apps article posted on this site earlier this month too, quality over quantity matters for long term longevity. Everyday I get to compare to just about any of the devices on the market in my job capacity and it never fails thus far the N900 trumps android's, apple's and rim's, in versatility, scalability and performance. Just my 2Cents

After reading through all of this discussion, this post came to my mind:

Greetings.

does sales numbers even matter in determining whether the n900 is successful ? who cares?

I mean, we know Nokia does not support the n900 like goog supports its adriods or apple supports its iphone, so from Nokia's POV the do not see the n900 as a product they can make MORE money on - i.e. the n900 is not a successful product and they do nto see it selling more going forward.

If the n900 was successful, Nokia would spend the money to support it properly, give it Ovi maps navigation like all other nokia smart phones and bring flash etc to the maemo platform or even give it proper Meego.

But Nokia are not doing ANY of this, and instead engages in silence that pisses off many n900 users, alienating them. This indicates that Nokia regards the n900 as breakeven at best and a product they do NOT want to further invest in.

That says it all really, because sales figures are USELESS unless you know how much it COST nokia to bring out the n900 and how much % return they are making on their investment. Sorry to say, but qgil's download figures are equally useless and misleading.

At the end of the day follow the money, if Nokia is not willing spending much more money on n900, then its a good bet they think the product wont sell more and so they wont spend more money on it - i.e. cut your losses.

Of course you can also think that the n900 sold huge but nokia are just dumbasses for not spending more to support the product, thats up to you.