This may be a very trivial question, but I'm not familiar with Nokia's history concerning cell phone development, so:

What I know so far about Maemo5 is (if I understand it correctly) that there'll be early alphas starting Dec. 2008, but there's no Nokia-device that would be able to run these releases. I also was under the impression that these early releases might work on non-Nokia hardware like Beagle Board or maybe even Pandora.

Recently, when I talked about this to a friend of mine who lives entirely in his Apple-universe, he told me this was absolutely unthinkable and I had to be mistaken: There was no way, he said, a company like Nokia could release an OS, even as an early alpha, when there was no Nokia hardware, but only hardware from other vendors it would run on.

This was the first time I thought about this:
It really seems a little strange. On the other hand, it's a logical thing to do when you want developers to release 3rd party applications in time.

So how did Nokia handle this when they released new versions of their phone platforms? IIRC, there was a compatibility break between some revisions of S60. What did developers have then? Did they have any Nokia-hardware the new system would run on before the official release? Did they have a SDK that emulated the whole device on a x86-PC? Or did Nokia release hardware and the new software at the same time? (I guess the last option, Nokia releasing the software and directing developers to non-Nokia phones to work with it, is out of the question here.)

Does anybody know?

It would be interesting if the way Nokia deals with software in general changed with the Maemo process.

I assumed that Maemo 5 will work on the N800/N810, just some of the features will be disabled. I hope that is the case, or there will be a lot of people annoyed I would imagine.

Also I assume this will just be the sdk, as you pointed out for the developers to test the builds etc.

So the time is coming for another "frankenbuild" on my N810 (same as diablo)

Also remember apple released the original iphone, which was completely pointless (in Europe)
Also their draconian T&C's to actually be a developer.
I'm sure if Nokia didn't allow anyone to develop freely, they probably would only release the OS after the hardware.
( [rotten] apples and oranges )

P.S. you think the next gen nokia will allow you to browse the internet "really fast" TM ;-)

The beagle board is not competing hardware. It's a naked board with a OMAP3. And I don't think much of maemo will run on the beagle or pandora. Most likely you will be able to run a naked SDK desktop such as can be run in scratchbox. It's just a means for developers to test their applications on OMAP3.

Before the N800 was announced, Nokia released SDK versions of OS 2007 for scratchbox. But scratchbox is on x86 and ARM emulation doesn't work too well. The beagle board could run the SDK in a real OMAP3 environment.

Here in Maemo Software R&D in Nokia, we developed Maemo 5 initially on N810 hardware until the hardware adaptation to the new hardware was working. Now we are working mostly on the new hardware with OMAP3 processor.

The SDK will be working initially, as correctly suggested here, in the Scratchbox environment. Because we are developing Maemo 5 with an UI and application framework that uses Clutter-based hardware graphics acceleration, it is not trivial to make the same code run on devices that do not have hardware-based graphics acceleration. In addition, if one does not have a HSPA modem available, several use cases that are visible in the UI will simply not work. And furthermore, if one does not have a high definition camera, then even more features will be rather useless. Not to mention that Maemo 5 is optimized for OMAP3 processor power. How the software will feel if one runs it on OMAP2 processor is something we don't know yet as long Maemo 5 itself is not feature complete yet, but it is something we are investigating.

By the way, we are on schedule with delivering our early SDK still this year. Stay tuned.

You mean hspa hardware and hirez cameras attached to the host can be used from within scratchbox under maemo? What kind of camera and modem do these have to be? I assume that you don't just support any USB modem and and webcam.

Also will the new SDK be usable besides an existing chinnook/diablo sdk? Or will it replace the old one?

Funny, I was absolutely sure I read something about Fremantle running on Beagle Board. Oh well...

in other words, dont expect fremantle and later on the existing hardware?

just say it already, rather then doing this marketing roundabout.

at least when its out in the open the community can direct their attention towards retooling diablo towards greater openness.

And while you're at it, just admit that it's going to cost more than $600 US.

Honestly, that's probably the less interesting direction. The interesting direction is re-tooling the already more-open Fremantle for OMAP2 hardware.

if you say so, and if it can be done at all...

by the sound of it, it will be less of a retooling and more of a "toss anything but the frame, then start over from scratch"...