Nokia produces part of it. Saying "Nokia produces the software" won't make all GNU, Linux and Gnome contributors happy.

Agree, or why cant the iPhone 2G or 3G run OpenGL games? The fact is that when there are hardware changes, it makes it hard to get support for devices without that hardware .. Mobile OSes are not modular enough yet to be able to abstract away all of the hardware and have a more hw-independent OS.

Well, actually, binaries are optimized to take advantage of certain hardware features, and something like GPS is very easy to add via Bluetooth, and then the device can say 'I have my default capabilities, including X' (GPS over SPP) hence allowing GPS applications. Reason it doesn't on Appel, is purely commercial/contol_freak based. With Maemo thats different, although one cannot run ARMv7 binaries on ARMv6. Since firmware is for individual model, might as well be that iPhone 3GS runs optimized binaries where iPhone 3G does not. Also, the devices aren't that much different, so its easy to keep supporting legacy hardware. And, the original iPhone is now 2 years old. (I find 2 years an appropriate time for official support.) At least with Maemo most of source is open, and Maemo is modular enough to add support for new hardware. Not that I find it quite useful to be able to connect a CD writer to N8x0, but ppl have done it, using Linux drivers. And many more examples exist, just now without USB host mode is a bit different.

The builds/updates for each iPhone is built for that hardware iteration. At the start of the build per OS level dictates which one it will be applied to:

• iPhone 3.1 download (iPhone1,1_3.1_7C144_Restore.ipsw, 241 MB)
• iPhone 3G 3.1 download (iPhone1,2_3.1_7C144_Restore.ipsw, 242 MB)
• iPhone 3GS 3.1 download (iPhone2,1_3.1_7C144_Restore.ipsw, 306 MB)

What that means is that Apple builds out an OS that includes/excludes what's not there in the hardware/firmware.

Now, what does that truly mean? Apple's maintaining 3 builds at the moment, more in the future perhaps. But from the original iPhone to the latest, they all can run OS 3.1.2. The whole speed factor - that's due to going from EDGE to 3G, to 3G with CPU and more RAM enhancements. To be 100% honest, I've played with both the 3G and the 3GS... I didn't see that much of a difference in most surfing. And for the most part - I'm an atypical user - I tend to use more wifi surfing than 3G.

Hi everybody,

From what I can understand, given how quickly phone hardware is growing, I can understand the difficulty in providing support to an old phone model. Having said so, as a Linux user for several years, having the latest version of a certain distro doesn´t necessarily change things dramatically.

In other words, I know many Ubuntu users who are still on Hardy, yet they still get updates on their kernels, they still get many application upgrades, and most importantly, even if those new versions for applications are not added to their repositories, they can still go after them an install them. Following the same logic, a Jaunty user wouldn´t suffer from not moving to Karmic, because s/he can still download and install most of the new features in Karmic (Firefox 3.5.x, Empathy, etc). Obviously, some of the OS specific stuff that is part of Karmic (software store, different notifications, default to ext4, Grub2, etc) would not be available in Jaunty, but the impact on the end user is not big, IMHO.

Is that analogy valid for an N900 user? If the case, a Maemo 5 user should still be able to enjoy 90% of what a Maemo 6 user will have available, right?

Can I get a quote where Apple promises that the next version of iPhoneOS will be backwards compatible with the previous devices ? Or is it anecdotal as in 'it was so up until now so we guess that's the norm' ?

@attila77: it's anecdotal, but they've done that for 3 'generations' now..

The whole App Store is based on what devices contain which hardware features.

Quite typical for Apple.

However, like I said, that can be a disadvantage if you use e.g. Bluetooth or USB to get more features than orig device such as GPS.

No iPhone supports hardware OpenGL, the 3G S supports hardware OpenG ES, version 2.0.

The only feature in Maemo 6 that I've heard about so far that I really care about being missing in Maemo 5 on the N900 is compatibility with portrait orientation across the entire platform. Even Nokia's Maemo devices vice president Ari Jaaksi admitted at the Maemo Summit, according to Ars Technica, that the lack of portrait support is a real weakness. Indeed, to me it seems like the one area where the N900 is a real regression from other existing devices. It doesn't seem like there's any technical reason why these sort of features couldn't work on the N900, it has an accelerometer after all. I think it would be a big mistake for Nokia not to provide some sort of upgrade to cover these features in the N900.

I think the sort of more advanced users who are attracted to this sort of device, will have higher expectations and if they feel simply abandoned by Nokia that will not be a good fist step with Maemo. Nokia needs to please the early adopters, to help generate interest and buzz about Maemo. I also think, as others have indicated in this thread, that as phones become more and more like desktop computers, people do bring expectations with them from that experience, like software upgrades (precisely because the experience becomes more and more about the software, rather than the hardware).

Technically, I'd say they have done it once... The iPhone 3G was not that more different (IIRC a different radio and AGPS, that's as much difference as there is between the N800 and N810), so the only real hardware change was when they switched to CortexA8 with the 3GS. I wonder if the Fremantle compatibility would have been any different if the TI drivers were available when that decision was made.