Well-done post and I agree with your sentiments John S but I wanted to add something.

I don't really expect Nokia to write all the apps (including PIM) and I don't think many here would be very upset if a third party (esp open) provided the requested solutions. BUT-- we still require the necessary leadership, and critical support of elements such as a core contact database, as has been described. Nokia certainly has done an awesome job in many aspects, but as you can see from recent responses there is some reticence over pushing the usage of the default contact infrastructure. I don't want Nokia "beating up" commercial or open source developers, but I don't want a half-dozen or so isolated contact databases ignoring each other on my device, either. Surely there's a solution possible. I don't want Nokia to accept that as the status quo and give up trying to push the common database.

There was a big push early on and we saw a LOT of app development... but by and large it's dried up or at least tapered off. What happened? IMO it behooves Nokia to survey those few hundred developers who received (edit) low cost N800s and find out what problems exist, and see what can be done to get the momentum going again. I'm not seeing many organized coalitions of open source developers dedicated to supporting the N800, as other platforms have enjoyed, and IMO that needs to improve somehow. I see some independent and competing efforts, though-- what keeps those guys from joining forces? Pride? Lack of awareness of each other? Failure to use maemo as a collaboration resource? Other? These questions are only partly rhetorical.

About the winning arguments vs the sales loss. I'm not saying those no-sales aren't real or not important. What I'm trying to say is: in our context first comes the sense, then come the sales. Products that make sense are products that are more inclined to make sales (they have other factors around but without sense, sales are more complicated).

This is why I'm recommending you to convince Nokia with good arguments about what makes sense and what not. You are experts at a user and developer level, and Nokia knows that.

Convincing Nokia through sales arguments is much more complex because Nokia has probably a better knowledge at selling than you or me (I'm told that is the company selling more electronic devices packaged in a box). When you see a potential customer leaving a forum with no sale, Nokia can see many other aspects that you or me ignore.

Sure, it is always interesting to see others' opinions and you never know everything about selling (not even Nokia) but since your time is limited my recommendation is (again) that you invest it convincing Nokia in the areas where your knowledge is strong and you find poor quality, inconsistencies or competitors' advantage.

Forgot about the Not Invented Here syndrome (I had to look at Wikipedia to know what was that acronym about). Well, I don't know. I joined this project only six months ago, so I wasn't present when the first decisions were made. For what I have seen and for what I have learned though, it looks to me that the pioneers that launched the 770 and the software inside made the most of the Invented Elsewhere software, tuning it to the tablets and pushing/funding many missing or incomplete pieces that were also invented as open source in upstream projects Elsewhere.

Every piece developed by Nokia and/or non-free had a reason to be like it was, and NIH didn't play a role for what I see. At least not in the way I understand you are rising this up, as ignoring what others have already done (intellectual property is one of the many potential factors to develop your own stuff instead of what others are doing, and it has to do with invented here or not here).

I will repeat again that most of the software included in the IT OS is open source and Invented Elsewhere. To me this is a clear symptom that Nokia looked and researched the outer world trying to find the invented pieces that didn't need to be reinvented. In some cases the election was clear, in some cases more complex or impossible.

But the platform and the applications are not static. They evolved and they keep evolving. I don't see anyone in our team reinventing wheels, and good stuff Invented Elsewhere is being taken into account either as open source projects to collaborate with or commercial & non-free projects to partner with.

on the software front, do you think that the 770/n800 w/ ajax support in the opera browser (more so than less) will be able to piggyback off of sites designed for the iphone despite the difference in screen resolution (use the zoom function i suppose?)

Whereas I prefer to use SyncML (or other syncing techniques) to give me a single common addressbook and diary across multiple systems and devices. This allows me to update once (from any device), especially phone numbers without having to remember to update every device, and also allows me a form of backup recovery should I change device (whether by choice or not).

SyncML isn't the only way to achieve this, but the majority of the rest of the NSeries devices support SyncML, and as an Internet Tablet, SyncML support would seem the sensible way to go.

Obviously, many people would also want or like Outlook syncing, but syncing and PIM functionality (Calendar, Contacts) should go hand in hand (in my opinion). Whether that's developed or only supported by Nokia, as a consumer I don't care - I just want the functionality to be there.

And as all apps being fully integrated and using this single contact list - I agree it should be a design principle wherever possible, but equally I'm happily for my Skype list to be separate right now, although combining it all into a single contact list would make sense for Skype to encourage us to use Skype for ringing any number in our contact list.

This could be a case of Henry Ford's "better horses" : if you ask users what they want, surely they'll answer "Outlook" because that's what they use and know, mostly. But if you give them SyncML that's a valid answer too, much more open and versatile; Outlook can sync with that, too, so I agree that's the most natural way to go, both for Nokia and Maemo.

Indeed - SyncML is well known and supported within Nokia (both in their smartphones and their simpler series40 phones), and with a simple client can connect to Internet SyncML servers, which can then be synced with other devices and programs, eg Outlook. It also fits into the ethos of the Internet Tablet too, by connecting to an Internet service, not a desktop client.

I notice the Maemo roadmap already has "Tablet/PC/phone sync framework" in the community wishlist.

Right, because that's where the revenue comes in: calling outside the Skype family. Odds are most of your contacts won't be Skype users, so if you call them, you pay.

Again, any reluctance by Skype to take advantage of this is mystifying to me...

I note the Skype Gear "Skype on N800" review talks about video support and bluetooth headset support as things that they feel would be worthwhile (note, they did not say either were coming, simply that they made sense and hoped they would come in the future).

While I definitely support *some* degree of company-to-community involvement, there are obvious limits... based on common sense if nothing else. The lastest strange revelation about the Whole Foods CEO's message board behavior really makes that clear:

Wow.

http://biz.yahoo.com/zacks/070712/8617.html?.v=1

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1184..._whats_news_us