Don't know how many people there are there...but don't forget Peter Griffin, ehm Schneider

Same as my answer would be to you.

Is that the magic staff they wave in the air and hope it makes all the bugs go away, and the pixels revive?

It is one part-time co-op student/intern.

who said i was askin?!

Indeed. And also to gauge the kind of speed I can expect in its development.

Nokia made statements such as "no compromises" regarding its mobile computer line. I would love if this becomes true. Maemo6 was referred to as "the ultimate UI"; "power of the social internet", "developers will love it", H2 2010.

Now the whole mobile industry is full of promises. It seems most manufacturers/brands overpromise and are wildly optimistic in their claims for when products and updates are released. In my opinion this goes for HTC, Samsung, Nokia, and not forgetting that king of delays SonyEricsson. I'm just wondering what I can expect. No doubt Nokia HAS to succeed with maemo or it's likely they'll be totally out of the top of the line mobile market.

I watched Nokia's entire capital markets day presentation with the eye of a consumer. What can I expect in terms of product and development if I go the maemo route?

Nokia's own predictions for Maemo looked optimistic to me. Check out Kai Öistämö's slide #3 where net sales for Maemo by 2011, is around 10-12.5% of Nokia's total device sales.

What does that mean in real numbers? I'm no financial analyst, and Nokia's reporting bundles "devices and services" together. This part of the organization employed 61 000 people in 2008. Probably a lot less in 2009, and even fewer in 2010.

The numbers aren't in from 2009Q4 yet, but Q1-Q3 showed a total sales in devices and services of €19.7 billion. A rough estimate would be around 26.7 billion for 2009 total, which would be 23.7% lower than 2008. Maybe I'm estimating too low. Furthermore I don't know how big the "services" part of this number is.

As far as I could tell Nokia expects to grow on par with the market in 2010. Nokia estimates a 10% device volume growth for 2010. There is no volume growth estimate for 2011. But let's assume 10% for that year as well.

But Nokia also expects falling prices. The segment for devices priced above €400 is expect to shrink from 17% to 6% between 2009 and 2011. Let's make a very conservative estimate and just allocate €27 billion in "devices and services" sales, that is no value growth, only volume growth.

To make this really simple, let's make an assumption that "devices and services" are mobile phones only. This will give a rough estimate of the maximum value of maemo phone sales:

27 billion * 12.5% = €3.375 billion. Assume a price/unit of €500 euros. Around 6.75 million maemo phones sold by end of 2011. I know a good financial analyst with insight can trash this rough estimate. Nevertheless it's my estimate. You can make you own, and if you have more time and better knowledge I welcome it.

The forecast for 2009 for Maemo based devices in Nokia's own presentation was 0. So quite the growth rate in 2010 and 2011.

Now my question is, what will this take in terms of resources and in particular, staff?

i think maemo sucks

Sorry, I mistook your "and of wat use is it to you" statement to be a question.

If you can do it, listen to the earnings calls and see if you can ask that question, using their estimates. The presentation you quote certainly sounds like they are betting the company on Maemo. But if they aren't putting the resources into the product it may be an indicator of further trouble with the company, and this is just a Hail Mary pass.

Maemo will be important for Nokia in the future and Nokia's capital markets day was the place tho show that who still thought otherwise, but Symbian will be even more important. They are expecting in 2011 it to be the mass market OS rather than the S40.

Nokia sold 472.3million phones in 2008

Really hard to know how will Maemo do in 2011 with out seeing harmattan ready yet, but if they will be able to make UI that they are talking about they can have achieve in best case Symbian like position they had in 2006-2007. Same goes for the Symbian^4 and Maemo 6 Qt marriage that again if all goes like a plan could actually overshadow many others. Lots of potential, but so does OSX, Android and maybe even WebOS.