Does it have to make sense? Nokia's move to WP7 doesn't make sense to me, and I wouldn't believe it before the official announcement. With this I'll reserve judgement until official announcements because I no longer expect Nokia to do things because they make sense and after all it is not a matter of life or death and my N900 will carry on working just as well as it ever did whatever they announce.

Hello, other guy. Other guy here... If it turns out you are right I will:

1_ Eat the magnet from my N800 back lid, as promised. (If anyone can find it for me.)

2_ I will say: "Dude, you were right all along, I am sorry to question you totally sensible news. And I should have known better that Nokia can always come up with some new way to disappoint me".

Because mine are the encouraging words: that Nokia will simply release one new device (1GHz Cortex-A8 developed last year and running some kind of Linux), but to everyone, even if focusing on developers at first. Just like it did with all previous NITs.

Your words are very discouraging for me. If it is just me who thinks this would be an insane move, than I say that here already: "It is just me! Nothing new, I was an outlier from the Gaussian's tail one more time."

They are still selling the N900 out there (you probably don't know this, since you have tons of in-development devices for you to use), and you really think they would miss the chance to _sell_ this?

Imagine this dialog:
Non-developer consumer: "Hello Nokia, I have 500 euros and I would like to purchase this Cortex-A8-with-Linux phone you just released because I like Jessie's Girl. Gimme."
Nokia: "Are you nuts? I don't want your money! This is just for developers who will develop stuff for a phone that we may or may not release some months from now!"

Sorry, I think this contradicts basic business principles. And Nokia is a master at releasing outdated hardware as if it were totally cool new stuff... Once it's on the street, the selling machine turns on and does its job.

A phone may be designed "for developers" or "for consumers". But once a company has warehouses filled with a products, the sellers can't give a **** about all this. It's about selling it, putting it on the street. If people want to purchase it, for the asked price, to use as paperweights, door holders, dildos, or maybe to disassemble and use the pieces for something else, they will sell it!!! Why wouldn't they?

How does giving the device exclusively for developers helps them? How is that strategic? How could that attract more developers, for example, or make more "consumers" get attracted by the next "consumer" device?

Do you know Occam's razor?... I just think your theory is too complicated, and "the simpler explanation" beats it.

I totally believe this upcoming Cortex-A8-running-Linux device is "for developers", but just in the same way all previous Maemo devices were "for developers" too, but were sold to everybody like any regular product.

The device is totally salable. It doesn't matter if the CPU is old and even if the packages are .deb instead of .rpm (sinful words for developers). If the thing is shiny and runs angry Birds, it's a potential "iPhone killer".

There could be an issue like this: they could be afraid that selling too much of these right now could hurt selling more of the following device. That would only be a problem if the next device were something very lucrative. But selling old hardware for a contemporary price is a quite lucrative deal... As long as it is sold.

We know very little about how many N900 were sold, and also about the other NITs... But we did hear that they always performed satisfactorily, and sold beyond expectations. We don't know what were the planned and the resulting developer/consumer ratios of the buyers. I don't think any Nokia executive ever got sad to hear that a N900 was bought by a non-developer. Why would any Nokia person be angry that someone they didn't plan to buy one of their products did it? That is always good news!!...

Any way, I am done with that. There is no deny there is something attractive about the idea that there is a "developer device" and a following "consumer device". Kids will love think that and I can't fight it, because the way I put things is less exciting. If that turns out to be true I will respect you a lot, other guy, and if you tell me the world will end tomorrow I will believe, and I will also be very happy about being a non-entrepreneurial engineer instead of a businessman.

It makes sense as long as there is an outdated "strictly for developers" WP7 phone with keyboard, followed by an up-to-date "consumer" WP7 phone without keyboard.

Can't figure out why it's so hard to believe for some that Nokia may be releasing 2 x devices.

they produce a device (with hwkb) that, at the time of development has some pretty good specs (as long as you're not one of those sucked into the whole CPU speed/bulk ram joke)

for whatever reason, be it kb issues (as originally stated) or UI, there's little interest from carriers and as a result, Nokia has an initial run of production units that it doesn;t know what to do with.

Several months later, EFLOP has taken over and is pushing MS as the OS of choice for high end devices.
He wants to kill of Meego development but certain influential members of the board/exec committee prefer to hedge their bets in case the MS decision fails.

Grab a revised handset UX image from the harmattan team, blow a copy of it onto the rejected devices and you have a "developer device". they get to offload the devices to a community of developers (who will make applications for them) and write the whole box and dice off as a valid tax claim for R&D.
In the mean time, they have fianlly got their act together sufficiently to produce a fully functional OS to go on one (of many) of their prototype candybar devices. (hints of the harmattan/Meego candy bar are strikingly similar to the WP7 branded nokia images doing the rounds)
Everyone here is assuming that ALL of Nokia is dancing to EFLOP's tune. you can guarantee that there are people in high places that are working hard to keep Harmattan/Meego alive and this is the sort of exercise that could be sold to the board as a means of keeping the dev community on Nokia's side despite the move to MS.

Despite many predicitons, the N8 and E7 are doing very well in a number of markets and if the "consumer" harmattan device is a raging success (candybar or not), it's going to provide a tremendous amount of leverage internally, for those who are still trying to keep the move to Meego alive.

Money talks and Bullsh*t walks.
Good returns on a commercial harmattan device will make it hard for EFLOP to justify sticking exclusively with WP7 (or 8) when there's a viable in-house product already making sales.

I don't know if you see me as one of these, but my issue is not with future devices, it's just with the notion that the Linux device that will be announced "in the weeks to come" (to quote Conversations) will be only given to developers, and never sold as a regular device.

I totally believe they had the hardware ready by late 2010, but then decided they should wait until they could release something that had a really innovative software running on it. That probably means better integration with Qt development tools and with MeeGo, if not even running MeeGo itself instead of the hard-to-explain chimera that was being planned for a long time. That is what they will release now, the successor of N900, but after all the adaption work to run MeeGo, the same work that is also being made to run MeeGo on the N900. Maybe they also took the chance to give it a better camera and enhance other easy-to-change components.

So this is why this "old" hardware will only be released now, because they were battling with software and UX design, etc, to make a real revolution, and not just and upgraded Maemo 5, a "next step".

You people seem to think that Nokia would be somehow ashamed to sell 2010 hardware, and so they would give it to their privileged developer friends who wouldn't mind using outdated hardware as a gift in return for the development of applications that would be only really be used by "commoners" in a future MeeGo device released 3 or 6 months from now, based on some of the same hardware of the first WP7 phone that is bound to be released soon.

Well, I think that is just wishful thinking. You people want to believe there is this group of special consumers called "developers" that will get a treat from Nokia because you are so dedicated and knowledgeable and nerdy and all... But that will not happen. As you have put very well, money talks and BS walks. Nokia is not ashamed to pick up an outdated hardware that they put some extra work on the software and sell it like a normal "new" device to developers and "consumers" alike, just like any other product. Maybe making it available first to developers and to "selected markets" as happened with all previous NITs, both for strategic and logistic reasons.

Do you think they had all the work to manufacture the N9, then made a few (97,000 it seems) that were stored in a warehouse, then abandoned the project, like, destroyed the printing plates or something, deleted the Gerber and CNC files, and now their factories are not able to produce this device anymore, and now they have this kind of rare collection of obscure devices that would either be burned or given away for free to our developer buddies?

I think this is all fantasy. A story that is nice to tell and hear, but bears little resemblance with reality. I think executives are very happy they managed to find a way to sell us old hardware that will be easier to produce, and will be lucrative because it will be sold as if it were a bleeding edge technology. Maybe they cut a deal to buy some now-"old" Cortex-A8 chips, for example.

And I will be happy to buy it, make no mistake!! But it will not be a special "for developers only" thing. It will be released as any regular device. "The N900 successor", maybe sold first to developers at conferences, and only available at Nokia stores and Amazon et alii a couple of months later.

After that there will be the first one or two WP7 devices... And eventually a second MeeGo device. It will be delayed for as long as the N9 and the WP7 devices are very lucrative.

Someone talked about Nokia not willing to compete with other **** phones... The fact is, as they have this **** phone ready to sell they might as well do it and make some money instead of losing it either trashing all the work or giving it away to hopeful development techno-beggars. They will not do this, they will pick up the thing, make a cool advertisement with some old 80s tune, and make you and all your non-developer buddies spend some money with it.

Then some day they will release a follower, yes... It will be the N9 successor" in Wikipedia. "Step 6 out of 5". Maybe a keyboardless version, like other Nokia phones have. The more it uses hardware from other models (WP7 phone) the better, that does make a lot of sense. But not a "consumer" phone after an obscure "developer" phone that will only be sold like this because of some accident. No. Two normal phones... The first using a project that is arriving late to the market regarding some of its specs, the second using more up-to-date tech. No privileges, no accidents, no interesting stories, no second-class citizens. Just normal business.

wasn't pointing the finger at anyone specifically champ.
just the general masses who believe it's not possible.

I think, based on your last post, that in many ways we're on the same wavelength.

I look forward to seeing a good hwkb device, if availble to the general public (I'm not a dev, just a tinkerer) and I also look forward to seeing a good swkb device.

If they produce one or both isn't going to stop me sleeping at night.
It's just a phone FFS and anyway, I got me a N900 running "real" Meego!

And that's what I meant by "surpassed" by other phones. Worse part, the lag got worse with time.

Swappolube and overclocking helped fix those out of the box issues.

Just posted this to Twitter:

I wouldn't be surprised if #N9 #Nokia #meego #maemo6 were sum of these: design http://bit.ly/auXJa4 & hardware http://bit.ly/jVtHT4 #u8500

My opinion is that design and hardware of consumer device will be quite amazing! Waiting for launch

EDIT: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=73317

I'm among the likely many people who has a second smartphone, running Android, that doesn't have a keyboard . . . and if I can't get ahold of a Nokia device with a keyboard, I probably won't bother with one. Much of the reason why I use an N900 as my primary device is because of the keyboard, which is tremendously useful for the kinds of geeky stuff I do every day (I'm a CLI guy, so wget, rsync, rtorrent, SSH and etc are my bread-and-butter) and even just for writing foolishly long messages (be they e-mails, texts, comments on ridiculously long forum threads, etc).

I've even written programs on my N900, although none worth publishing to the wider world, but that kind of thing just isn't practical without a hardware keyboard (it's only barely practical as-is). It'd be cool to have a powerful, fancy new phone, but if it's lacking major aspects of the one I currently have then it's not really easy for me to justify the expense.

It's not a knee-jerk reaction or a "OMFG WTF I hatezzz NOkia #&#$%@", it's an honest consideration of the features that through experience I've figured out are useful for me, and one of them is a hardware keyboard. If I can't get a MeeGo device with a keyboard, I'll just hold on to my N900 until it breaks, and see what the market is like when that dark day comes. And I'm certainly not irate, just quietly sad.

@keithzg

Desire does duty as a backup phone when
i've killed the battery on the N900 (moreso now because I'm playing with daily N900 DE builds and constantly rebooting)

Don't get me wrong. the reason I got my N900 was the keyboard.
We are starved for hwkb alternatives in Australia with most of the decent android hwkb devices missing our shores.

I guess I'm also lucky enough to be able to afford to upgrade every 6-12 months.
Part of the reason why I'll probably end up getting the harmattan device (and the HP3 if it supports 850/2100 UMTS), oh and the Fujitsu Loox (just to see if i can wipe WP7 and dual boot Meego and symbian!)