Yep, you made them. The answer is yes, it will be as polished as the user community wishes to make it. That's what an open platform looks like.

A closed platform is as polished as the platform owner makes it.

I hope you find a platform that fits your needs.

Some very interesting points been made here by the OP and some of the replies and i will add some too.

First of all the N900 IS capable of a lot more than it is right now with the current OS and the meager updates it has aquired from Nokia but please note and remember it is a computer in it's own right (the first device of this kind as a mobile phone) so is inevitable it will go on to better days in the future.

This community can play a big big part in the future development of the N900 as it has a obvious direct connection to the manufacturer Nokia.

The problems in the future will be from Nokia if they do not give Meego a full exsistence on the N900 with all closed drivers incorperated, this is when the community can step in with pressure at that stage, not before, to say to Nokia hang on here we have a full blown community that has invested in the N900 and obviously i dont think it would get to that stage as Nokia do not want the negatives in relation to anything they dont do for the N900 in the future.

My cards as i have said before on here are on Nokia to give us more and more as Meego grows and Nokia have already started the N900 "platform" for Meego and will constantly add to it as time goes on.

The biggest problem on here is the lack of knowledge of actual future developments for the N900 from Nokia themselve's that is making people unsure and sceptical which in turn leads to bad press all round on this community.

Please remember the N900 IS a COMPUTER as well as a mobile phone and that alone should give assurance, for example the Windows platform grew from strength to strength and so has Linux.

We need time... time to construct Meego as that is the chosen future by Nokia for the N900 so everyone please please be patient and give that time because it is fact... the N900 is a computer and the very first of it's kind and apart from the usb issue (now fixed) has many many countless possibilities.

Whatever OS Nokia come up with as long as they provide the closed drivers which i am sure will be available soon, will enable even the likes of Windows to be programmed into the N900, so what is the worry here?.

It is only a matter of time for development to progress to enable everything thats available now and in the future to be available for the N900, that includes what you have got for the likes of iphone and other platforms/os..... what a wonderful thought !.

Maybe someone else can shed some light on \what i have said also.

I believe they have been.... and answers were provided.

If the purpose now is to continue flogging this dead horse and allow the answers given to be interpreted as "Nokia doesn't care" or "Nokia as a company is dumb" well then you are steering this thread toward perhaps your personal agenda. Quite a deviation from the original question if you ask me.

Could someone make a bucket full of money if they catered to "User experience"? Yes, Apple has done so already.

Did Apple raise the expectations of the average new smartphone user? Yes...

Did Nokia provide a means to design, develop, and build future mobile devices through its NiT's?... Yes.

Did, or has anyone else provided hardware to do the same since the NiT's? ... No.

Two different purposes from the get go...

Apple may have been able to catch most of the fish in an imaginary, the new user barrel.

However, Nokia may have provided the means to imagine this barrel in the first place.

How or what Nokia market it as is irrelevant. When they launched the N93 (or was it the N95?) their marketing nonsense was something like "It's what the computer has become".

What is relevant here is whether they have put in love and passion to make it a polished product. Where features are complete and work as advertised and there are no nasty surprises.

But the fact is that all Nokia's phones for the past 5 years at least are works in progress and most are never finished and are abandoned in favour of the next new phone.


This is more of a UI issue. It's obvious the people who made maps for the N900 didn't read the maemo UI guidelines.


Exactly. The average user is used to the "fullscreen" button having an arrow pointing in a NW direction. Along comes maps and decides that having the arrow pointing SE would be a good idea, and having it pointing NW would toggle it back to non-fullscreen mode.

That's because the iphone doesn't have a physical keyboard. The N900 has a nice keyboard but for some reason Nokia wants Maemo 5 to be an iphone wannabe and shuns the use of the keyboard. I am so surprised that the blooming arrow keys don't work in most cases when you expect them to - instead you have to use the stupid kinetic scrolling thing.

To be honest, your gripe with Nokia Maps on the N900 seems a bit stupid, the icon is at least in the same frigging location. Did you, or do you know of any occurrence where someone got confused? No, because it's not a problem in reality, you're just being a software pedant. I like Nokia Maps at least the way it looks, having applications look different is nice imo, as long as there isn't any unexpected behaviour, which is not the case here at all ...

This is a known bug that has already been fixed in git. If like me you don't want to wait for PR 1.3 to fix it there's a patched version of Modest you can install that also includes some other performance improvements. Works very nicely.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=56634

Yes I am fine with that. I can send and receive MMS messages on my phone now. I don't care if that function was provided by Nokia, Frals, or some third party company. The end result is the phone does what I want it to.

While not all aspects of the N900 are open (i.e. phone, conversations, etc...) as noted above - there are enough parts of the OS that are open that the community can compensate for some of the platform's short-comings.

Unfortunately this is a trend being seen more and more these days in all industries. For example, you go spend $60-$70 on a new Playstation 3 game only to not have it work because of a bug that requires you to spend two hours downloading and installing a patch. Companies are getting lazy and sloppy choosing to adopt a 'release it now - fix it later' mentality.

It's not exactly trivial to come up with a good solution for this.

The solution you were hinting to in your other posting doesn't really scale up to be a system-wide solution.

Basically, if the UI would be a traditional desktop / focus based UI, with toolbars for most frequent commands, then I would agree more. Then how user deletes one email - taps on an email, then presses delete - and how he deletes multiple emails - highlights multiple, then presses delete - would be similar. However, with an object based UI the primary way to do a single action is completely different anyway. In the single item case the way is to tap the email, go to the subview, press delete from there. This solution doesn't scale up to multiple items, so there isn't really an argument towards shared learning and user patterns. Object menus are not a primary means to do actions.

For the object menus, although you might find some limited cases where their commands would fit the multiple selection function needs, often the object menus have more commands than what you would want for multiple selection (commands like "View details"). Additionally, if you think of a system-wide solution there are views in the system where there are more than one type of object at the same time. Say for instance a search results type view, with multiple types of objects.

What happens if the user would multiple select five emails and three photos at the same time and they would not share the same commands amongst themselves? What commands would be shown initially, what happens when the user begins to select items. It's really hard to think of how this would be done elegantly.

Furthermore, there is an issue of discovery. With the current solution commands can be placed directly in the menu, readable for the users. "Delete items", "Tag items", "Share items", for instance. Doing it in a way where the only command in the menu is something like "Select multiple" and then the commands are only revealed afterwards hides the commands: the user doesn't know what he can do before he goes into this mode and sees the commands.

And still, in the case where the user selects the command first the following view can adapt to show only contents that match this command. For instance, if the user selects "Share items", if the previous view contained items where this command would make no sense with, these items can be filtered out and a more clean view can be provided. Doing this the other way round, you cannot really filter anything beforehand. If the application supports multiple commands and content items, the user has to see all the options.

Commands first isn't imho a retrofitted solution. Feel free to propose something better, either for this application or for a global solution, though.

Forgive me for quoting the person I quoted, my statement isn't directed to that person at all; however it's a general inquiry where I'm either overlooking something or totally oblivious to something. Neither is new to me.

However... if the community can make Maemo, any iteration of it, as polished as they wish it to be; why is it not as polished as some members would want it to truly be? The problems are very minor, you can overclock it for a better experience, change the transitions... but those aren't really polishing as much as helping the platform along.

To me, polishing would be... well, eradicating the existing bugs that are hampered with WONTFIX tags. Hit Bugzilla if you're missing my point on that. Or... totally changing the UI, to make it leaner or more versatile - the recent ApMeFo is a great example of this in motion. But those level of apps are far and few in-between. And the bits that really need polishing - incoming phone call, look at in portrait and that delay for instance - will more than likely never happen because that bit is closed.

So how can this community really polish Maemo 5 when the parts that need it the most - besides Modest - are really closed?