Only thing what I know after talking with Nokia employee who has been involved with maemo for longer is that N900 was to Nokia success. I think that they totally underestimated the power of hype circling around blogs and forums. And what I understood from his comments is that they had to order quite much more batches after first ones went like puff.

I don't know where you work. In my company, when we plan a product, we try to figure out who may buy it and then tailor it around the target group's requirements. (Actually, we do it the other way round: First we identify target group & need and then we try to find a product... but anyway...)

Before we launch a product, we need to make sure it's profitable. It needn't be successful in terms of units sold (some of our products we sell less than 100 times, others several million times). The only requirement is that the money we put into developing and marketing the thing is less than what we get from our customers in return. (Well, not quite as simple, but you get the idea.)

Now having one of our "100 items sold" products accidentally sold 901744 times would be a disaster. A product targeted at only 100 customers makes assumptions about these customers, about their needs in terms of customer care, about their technical skills etc. etc.; selling it to 901744 customers means that 901644 of them will most probably not be satisfied: They'll return the product, use the technical helpline more often than we had calculated, write negative reviews and so on. Costs would go up significantly, the whole business case would no longer be valid... and we'd actually lose money because of the additional sales.

So depending on who the product was targeted at and who actually buys it, more sales can actually mean higher costs per unit sold (customer care, returns)... and may in the end make the whole product unprofitable if your margins weren't too high to begin with.

Was the employee named Bernie Madoff?

In my opinion, N900 is quite of achievement in internet tablet phone series (N7XX,N8XX). I personally think that maemo is way better than symbian since i used to own 5800XM. From hardware perspective, N900 was quite advance at that time. It has 32gb internal memory, can have up to 16 gb external memory or possibly more, 5MB camera, etc. Not to mention the ability to do multitasking (can run 32 apps simultaneously).

What it lacks are Nokia supports/commitment for the device and commercial apps. Not long after N900 was launched, Nokia started to shift to another device namely N8/N9 and new symbian^3 os. This is what kills N900. Got betrayed by its creator.

I personally think that N900 was a stepping stone of the unborn N9. Without maemo, meego will not exist. So N9 owes a big time to N900.

It's a geek phone, and an awesome one at that. How many other phones allow you to easily dual boot, much like a pc into ANDROID vis NITDROID. It pretty much transforms your phone into something it wasn't initially designed for. Once calls and battery life improve on nitdroid you can fully go droid if so desired This for me makes the N900 very desirable since unlike other phones you are not locked into the OS the phone maker gives you That is a huge deal for us geeks...

this is the point:
see apple has the iphone or alternatively the iphone and for a change additionally: the iphone. they improve it and put some new technology in it but it stays one line and nothing else.

thats soo different from nokia who puts out devices en mass. all kind of types. differnt types and...

I don't think the tablet market got "hot" because it suddenly decided to do so. It got "hot" because Apple released the ipad and Jobs' cult army of fanbois fanatics all wanted one.

What if Nokia had released a smartphone before Apple did? That's a rhetorical question BTW

actually nokia messed the dual boot up. it doesn't dual boot for they got the bootmanager wrong. well you can't fix it. why? because it is proprietary nokia nolo bootloader.

such things are excactly my point: either they had to make nolo capable of multibooting(some effort) OR have it in a way to be replacable OR even better use some existing bootloader that works by just pushing some patches(device dependend drivers) upstream.... .

but instead they didn't make nolo fit AND put it in in a way that it is very hard to replace. now we chainload uboot and folks have problems with that. now tell me that makes for good promotion compared with a device that is capable of it without the problems.

n900 introduced some variety into a boring world of smart-phones. If the upcoming N9 will be just like every other android phone out-here it will be hugely disappointing. I love N900 for its customization, hardware and a shear power of linux (without silly VM) in it.

I used android phones, G1, Vibrant, they are all iCRAP clones...

Hey, it's the new Nokia z500 tablet!