Source?

They've stated they're releasing a product (a slate, it seems?) this year, and continuing Meego development, but I hadn't heard anything about further products.

They should have been competent. They should have made phones with modern hardware. They should have used one, fully featured and scalable OS on all of their phones.

Lots of shoulds, but the management were still far too delusional from the Nokia glory of the past.

In answer to the OP i know what they should NOT have done and that is bring out the N900 based on Maemo software knowingly tricking us with promises and updates that never happened because the crew working on Maemo were obviously not good enough and not working as a team.

Quim told us how fantastic this Maemo was going to be and it did not work out and it was NOT his fault, blame that on the grasshoppers that just failed in there work on Maemo leaving Quim in the air feeling somewhat let down to say the least !.

Nokia then should NOT have promised us Meego and then dump that within a few month and i bet you this was also because of lacking software engineers who did not do there job.

I would like some answers from Nokia for sure because i just do not see the logic in the way they portayed this N900 FLAGSHIP and the resulting practically non exsistant backup for the Maemo OS.

Whoever thought out the Maemo concept in theory was good but without the support of the OS team it should never have been released.

When the N900 was released it had far too many flaws and very little in the way of apps going for it and it now appears Nokia could not sustain the OS and instead eventually gave up on the idea... ask yourself why ok.

When prototypes are tested they are supposed to be field tested thoroughly for any flaws, this was clearly not the case for the OS of the N900.

I would also like to know what and how Maemo.org came about, was it to support the OS or was it to give hobbiest programmers the opportunity to write for the Maemo OS.

For Maemo.org members to even be capable of writing OS software and apps it could not have done so without the relevent data sheets on every device on the m/b of the N900, you simple cannot write software and address unknown components, it is absurd to even suggest.

Many questions here but i can tell you from my own experiance and watching now after over a years performance that Nokia clearly did not do the background proggramming that was needed prior to release as the OS itself was very meager for the want of a better phrase.

Had i been in charge of the N900 development , it would never have left the factory without reasonable apps and fully field tested for flaws.

Nokia have now shown to me at least that they are very cumbersome and slap happy in there design and badly lack software engineers capable of the job.

What they should have done is have more than 3 developers in all of Nokia working on it.

They had much more than 3 devs working on it.

I just wished that things would have been released in a finished form, not unfinished as we've gotten accustomed to.

No. Just... no.

Meego is a large project, started as a partnership between Intel (their entire Moblin team) and Nokia (part of their Maemo team; since Maemo was a shipping product, part of them stuck around for "support", such as it is). Intel's not going anywhere, and they have slightly more than three people. There's also other corporate partners contributing now, and I can name at least three non-Nokia members of the Maemo community who are actively contributing to Meego, and there's also plenty of community involvement from the Moblin side, as well as some newcomers...

Then within Nokia, there's all the people making contributions to Meego itself -- I don't really know how many. These guys make all the stuff that's common across Meego devices, or is specific to Nokia devices (e.g. hardware drivers) but not a competitive advantage.

Then finally, there's the group working on Nokia's UI customization to Meego -- Nokia's special sauce that differentiates a Nokia Meego device from, say, an HTC Meego device; THIS team is three people. Which, frankly, is not necessarily a bad thing or undercommitment; mythical man-month and all that.

Nokia's new definition for the MeeGo platform devices is to use it as a test platform for "future disruptions". This means they will innovate with it to find out and learn new trends, such as they should've done for touch screens with Symbian for example.

With MeeGo being the high-end of the old Nokia, I think Nokia can't release too many MeeGo devices because it might end up confusing their strategy to analysts etc. Besides, I think the biggest fear is that MeeGo will direct attention away from WP7 devices.

Personally I feel that Elop isn't interested in making Nokia successful nor is he interested in truly innovating the mobile space. He is in it for Microsoft to make a better buck on mobile devices. This has become clear with him being among the biggest shareholders of Microsoft and his hiring of former Microsoftians into Nokia. I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing a fusion of Mic n Nok in the very near future.

That quote was a little funny to me as I understood it as the people contributing from Nokia side to MeeGo Handset UX reference applications, ie, the open source ones. Handset UX apps - Which was primarily Intel's responsibility. Rest of Handset UX stack (compositor, toolkit, etc) was Nokia doing that.

I think those 'three' might actually have been from our Nokia N900 hardware adaptation team as we did contribute and help where we could, to move things faster ahead.

Keep in mind MeeGo Handset UX != Nokia's differentiation

Ah, I could be misunderstanding it. That would make sense with it being an "external" team, too.

I agree wholeheartedly, though I'm glad they brought the n900 out to the market anyway, it showed us something different. And if i recall, the n900 wasn't really meant for the masses, it was an experimental phone.

Something like a prototype for devs to get used writing apps for, but it got alot more popular than expected. They unfortunately didn't polish the OS enough even with the increased demand, and didnt come out with any additional devices geared for the masses.

I wouldn't blame their technical team, I would blame their management. Nokia has the talent and skills, it just wasn't managed properly. There was no proper vision for maemo (and later meego), and they didn't push it as hard as they could have.

Look at HP, when they bought over Palm to get webOS, they dedicated resources to making sure it works. From the way they presented a few days ago, it just shows how much thought was put into the product.

Its not just about a great idea, its also about how the idea is executed, nokia had the great idea, they didn't have the proper execution.