Exactly. I was ready to plunk down the money (well, as soon as I'd scraped it up) to buy an 800 just before the news broke about the lack of OS 2007 support for the 770. I have no problem with paying for a worthwhile hardware upgrade. I have no problem paying a reasonable price for an OS upgrade. But I'm not going to spend $400 on a handheld if I think the manufacturer is going to effectively kill development on it within a year - especially when the platform is in as much flux as it apparently is.

The Nokia IT development team, to date, seems to be perfectly willing to chuck out existing work and move forward without regards to backward compatibility if it means making a better device. We saw that in OS 2005-OS 2006, and we're seeing it now with both the 800 hardware and OS 2007. And in a way that's fine and even admirable. But if you do it too many times, you end up fracturing both your developer base and your user base - and the current base isn't exactly huge to begin with. If at all possible, you should try to ease the pain and avoid fragmenting the audience by providing a way to bring everyone forward together... which happened in OS 2005-2006, but didn't happen here.

What I'm really hoping is that the Nokia IT division learns a lesson from this mess. Some of Jaaski's statements on his blog seem to recognize that they screwed up bad on this one, and that they will try to do better in the future, but so far their track record hasn't exactly been good. It may be too late to do anything for the 770, if the hardware changes and lack of hardware abstraction are as bad as Jaaski suggests. If that's true, though, I think Nokia owes some kind of meaningful good-faith gesture to 770 owners. At the present time, we only have two ways to predict their future actions: their public statements and their past actions. Their statements post-furor certainly sound positive, but talk is cheap and their performance and actions to date don't inspire confidence in their ability or willingness to carry through. What's needed is some kind of concrete action, deeds not words, to restore that confidence; something like the support pledge Milhouse describes might work, though it'd need to be binding in some way to avoid being seen as mere words.

Short of something like that, the only way I can see to reliably judge their statements is to wait for the next major release and see how well they follow through. Which I really don't want to do, since I like the basic Internet Tablet design and would love to get the performance/memory improvements in the 800 - but their actions with OS 2007 have just about killed my trust in their commitment to support.

and to add yet another voice to the mix.

I don't care if 800 apps run on my 770. I, like many others, would just like my 770 to run in a stable fashion.

1) Don't randomly reboot. and if you do, leave me a message somewhere of what caused the reboot so I can fix something / open a bug.


Is it the app or the OS?

2) App Manager should quit breaking installs by randomly crashing. This causes me to sometimes have to open an xterm and fiddle with apt --fix switches. (Not for the faint of heart or avg consumer). Again, where are the errors logged?

3) Installing apps/themes should not cause a reboot. (see #1)


-- Opera was supplied w/ the tablet, and the source is closed. This says to me it was licensed to Nokia for the 770, so either Opera or Nokia is reponsible:
-- Links should not just stop working. I should not have to go through a ritual of max/min the browser + reload, waiting until a link will either click on its own or let me press/"Open Link"
-- a website with content that cannot be handled should not cause the browser/system to crash/reboot. Isn't that one of the reasons why alt tags are used? or even a broken image icon. Don't blame the browser barfing on the website itself. And, I shouldn't have to have to go through a cycle of hunting websites, via my pc or 770, to know "oh, this website is bad, i'm going to crash, so avoid it". What happened to the ability to have capability degradation?
-- Fine, so Google calendar doesn't work well with my 770. I can live with that. Same with no site running anything higher than Flash 6. Could we at least get a list of the exact capabilities of the Opera version on the 770 in re: ajax and other plugins, and maybe even a roadmap if future versions are coming?


I'm not holding my breath after someone at Nokia filled me in on a dirty little secret:
"The 770 and n800 are just experiments in the eyes of Nokia. Remember the N-Gage?"

So, I'm sticking with my 770. I love what it does, when it does it. And I have faith in the OSS community that this thing will sparkle on day, with or without the help of Nokia.

forgot to mention this:

the 770 may be 1.5 yrs old, but I wasn't, as many others weren't, able to get my hands on one until barely a year ago, and not for lack of trying, either.

And for those who said those who bought the 770 right before the advent of the 800 should have done their research first. Please. We all knew somehting was coming, even with the FCC filings, but the exact what and when were kept in the dark from us mortals.

I'm 100% with spycedtx on both these posts. This reasonable and cool-headed summary is closest to my own experience and feeling about it all.

Until CES I was ready, not to say itching, to whip out my credit card for what I saw as a worthwhile and long-awaited hardware upgrade (which it certainly is, too). It's the OS2007 botchup that stopped me cold in my tracks.

What bugs me most is the very real possibility that the N800 could be the 770 all over again... To paraphrase spycedtx :

I ordered my 770 in the very first days of public availability, in Nov. 2005. It was backordered after the first few hours however, so I only received it a month later, in early Dec. 2005. Even so it was one of the very first units in the wild here in France, developer's program excluded (and it drew quite a few stares too, which after all is the main function of these gadgets, no ? :-). So if what many fear around here (based on what little information, vague and ambiguous, Ari Jaaksi and the maemo developers care to share with us), that means an actual "supported" life of the 770 line of, what, fourteen months ? A bit short, even for a gadget. And what of those who bought later ?

Moreover, over half of that period (until July of 2006) was spent making do with ITOS2005, which is widely recognized as a beta at best, both in stability and functionality. Sheesh, we even had to through a binary format change...

ITOS2006 is closer to a 1.0 release, but in no way close to the epitome of what can be achieved on the 770 platform. There is NO valid reason, IMHO (be it technical or licensing or whatever), that it can't benefit from some of the improvements we see on the N800 : official support for BT keyboards and other devices, a more robust Application manager, an upgraded Hildon API, improvements to the GUI and usability, a media player that chokes on less formats... I'm not even asking for the new Opera and Flash player, just for a Linux machine that's doesn't reboot itself at least once per 24 hours.

Of course I could bite the bullet and move to the N800, which would be an attractive proposition in its own right, if only it didn't look so much like a potential repeat right now. A nice hardware platform, obviously rushed to market software-wise. System instability (endless reboot loops for no obvious reasons, caused by end-user actions, like adding an RSS feed, not hacking...). Interesting new hardware that is not taken advantage of by the system or provided software -- think camera, DSP or graphics acceleration (heck, even MPlayer on the 770 works better than media player on the N800 !). New features in the App manager (.install files) with nowhere to point them at. And so on...

Yes, yes, this will all be improved upon. But it feels like starting all over again. Say this is the N800's "beta" phase. Then we have the "real" OS2007 sometime this summer, which brings it to the level of OS2006 for the 770. And in fourteen months, when things are starting to get interesting, Nokia brings out the N900, with yet another excuse for not being able to retrofit non-hardware-related improvements to the N800/770 line... ring any bells ?

Like most everyone here I'm a gadget freak, and I'd really like to fondle an N800, I would. As iFranck very nicely said, it's not even a matter of affordability, it's become one of trust. I believed in what Nokia said it was trying to do, and wanted them to succeed, and voted as a consumer. Now I'm not so sure, and while my 770 lasts I'm going to wait and see what sort of signals (and actual deliverables) come out of Nokia and the Maemo teams, or not.

Of course, at the other end of the scale, we have Microsoft and their 30-year history of delirious and redundant roadmaps, permanent revisionism, and unfulfillment as an art form, which is no better for consumers. But then Nokia has essentially only one product line here, so it ought to do better, right ? :-)

I totally agree with the postings above from tbutler and fpp. I could write lots & lots but the key point is that the way Nokia has dropped 770 users is making me really hesitate about buying an N800. The internet is a moving target - flash, AJAX, etc. Unlike a PDA, an internet tablet which is not upgraded will, over time, be able to access fewer & fewer web sites.

I work in the CE industry and realistically either the cost of new versions of Opera & Flash is allowed for in the sale price of the product or they won't happen. Nokia clearly didn't plan / budget for browser / flash updates for the 770. Ari's most recent blog doesn't make me optimistic that they have been planned for the N800. He says "However, our goal is to make Internet Tablets as interoperable with internet services as possible. " On the surface this sounds good but he doesn't mention maintaining this compatibility for a 2-3 year lifetime of the device. Opera in the N800 is already one version out of date. How out of date will it be in 1 years time?

See, when I say stuff like that, they call me a troll.

Yeah.

<stan_voice>
Oh my God, they called us trolls!
</stan_voice>

<kyle_voice>
Bastards!
</kyle_voice>

Oh, yeah, by the way, Nokia just released a new version of the ITOS 2006 firmware for the Nokia 770!

So much for "no official support for the 770"... :P

Where did you see this?


one other "Rant" about the entire OS updating:
I *REALLY* hate having to reinstall every fargin' app if I want to update the OS. *sigh*

It's on the mailing lists, and you can find it here:
http://europe.nokia.com/A4144790

Yeah, that's totally annoying indeed. I'd love to have some sort of apt-get upgrade style upgrading procedure for firmware instead of reflashing.