Hello dear Community,

over the past few weeks I've been constantly following what's going in this forum, and reading some of the Threads/comments here made me slightly confused. Today then I felt the urge to finally formulate my impressions and share them with you.

I understand people are pissed off.
I understand they feel that Nokia has abandoned them.
I understand they are upset because basic things are not working or because promised features are not present & take longer to develop.

But, do you think ranting about it will make it come quicker?

I certainly disagree and have one word for you: patience. Patience, with a big capital P - a consistent, patient, capital P.

Patience - Why you should have it

Let me paint you a picture: The N900 was released in November as a "4/5th of the way" device for geeks or people who wanted to become one. Back then, the only people (mostly) who purchased it were tech people who had read about the device in various blogs/forums weeks before it was released and couldn't wait to get their hands on it. From the beginning, it was aimed at a more specialised crowd. Fact.
Just as an example, I had never heard about the device before walking into one of Nokias Flagstores in December 2009 and being presented with one. And I wouldn't consider myself a geek.

Now, between November and December 2009 sales have increased, people started developing more and more applications for the N900, bugs were reported, and things started to kick off (keep in mind we are still talking tech people). Around Christmas then the word spread that Nokia has something new up their sleeves and 'normal' people started getting interested. This process is still going on! More and more people are purchasing/preordering the N900 as we speak, and as soon as sales increase or continue to show a positive trend, Nokia will feel the pressure to release more and more material for the N900! Be patient - give people more time to be introduced to the N900 - either through the internet or through their carriers (Vodaphone UK for example).

Time > Increase in Sales > Increase in People involved (on Forums, Blogs, etc) > Increase in Pressure on Nokia / Increase in generated Interested > More Apps, More Fun!

Why so negative?

To come to the centre point of my post: stop the constant negativity. Stop the negative "This is why my Nokia N900 sucks"-threads, stop the ranting about patches. It's not constructive, it does not make Nokia work faster, and worst of all it only puts more and more people off the device because the forums are cramped with negative flame posts. If you have a problem, feel free to post your question, but try and be a bit more careful and differentiate between a real help request and the start of another rant-thread. We have had enough of those.

The Bright Side - Stay positive!

Look at the bright side of the N900, enjoy it's current features, join in and develop apps with this great community, even if you only participate as a Beta Tester or give advice/comments. If a patch comes out and the important feature has been missed out again - take it. Suck it up. Vote for the important bugs & features and settle down! Help those who have trouble installing it, and enjoy what little the update brought!

Everytime I go through the forum I find something new, something in the making, I discover a person who has spent the past few weeks working on a new application, and I am grateful! You, Join in! Hit the thank button more often, let people know how much you appreciate their work, become a part! Because that's why people still come here and develop - because it's a great place to be. For the time being. Is it really worth risking this? Seriously: If mood goes down and developers go, we can wave our platform goodbye. And there's nothing Nokia could do.

I know there's already a great community here, and we have a few people here already who really make me stay. I add my cents by helping the community as much as I can. Because that is what it's all about. Instead of ranting, let's roll up one's sleeves and discover, develop, help. Whether you're a newbie or an old Veteran.

Statement

To finish I would like to make a statement - I expect that by the end of March 2010 the N900 will have matured into a hot device I would take over any phone on the market. If not, I will go to Dubai to milk cows in the desert.

Regards,
Hau3er

(BTW, Im obviously interested in your response )

"I expect that by the end of March 2010 the N900 will have matured into a hot device I would take over any phone on the market. If not, I will go to Dubai to milk cows in the desert."

that made me laugh lol... nice post!

Congrats, you certainly put it nicer than I ever could have

Totally agree. By one side people want maemo to be totally made by community on the other way they are always turning to nokia. I guess that people don’t know what they really want.

It's all about spreading the message I believe In the end, we are a community and as such we rise and fall together.

@Bec:

That's prescisely it If more people would stick to that it would make life easier for a lot of us.

And the traditional reminder: If you file bug reports, be as exact as possible, click by click, so it can be reproduced and fixed. And search before filing to avoid duplicates. :-)

I would agree about the negative and disagree about the positive. I dislike "My N900 is awesome" as much as "My N900 sucks" and if I never see an "I think it's great - go buy an iPhone" post it will be too soon.

As an N810 user, when I found this forum, it was filled with useful information. Sometimes hard to find, sometimes contradictory, but useful. I don't recall ever seeing the vitriol we now have on both sides.

If I had to pick an indication that the discussions were going to go downhill, I would say it's when the phrase "Fixed in Fremantle" entered the N810 world. I no more cared that the (at the time) rumored N900 would do what I wanted my N810 to do than I cared that the iPod Touch would do it. Now we see more and more posts pointing to the next big think ("Handled in Harmattan"?) instead of dealing with how a user can or cannot accomplish what they want on the N900 with Maemo 5.

Like the N810, the N900 is a flawed device that does some things well and other things not so well or not at all. This community can best serve its members by trying to help figure out how to maximize the usefulness of the N900.

If it can also remember that there are still Diablo users with our aging N8x0 devices, that would be nice as well.

I think this is why there has been some negativity in the community.
By nokia's track record bugs seemed to fixed in the next version of maemo and this usually means a new device.

To be fair Nokia did release the n900 earlier then they should have done but considering the current firmware update was released 6 weeks after the release is pretty good going (personally I would have waited a little longer).

Nokia seem to be listening at the moment and have produced the phone I have been waiting for and eventually bought.

I just think people are a bit spooked by owners of previous devices feeling abandoned by the company.

The number of applications released for the n900 is amazing - the community is doing a sterling job.

But a new member of our community doesn't really care about why Nokia did what it did or whether they are going to do something different in the future. They want to know what they can do now with the device in their hand.

Speculation that the next firmware release might include MMS and might be available in 2Q2010 (and note that I made up both of these things) might be fun but what a new member who wants to use MMS needs to be told is that they can't, the N900 doesn't support it out of the box but that there is an app, fMMS, that might work for them. OTOH, a new member who wonders about the voice nav announcement needs to be told that as far as we know they are out of luck; no plan to support the N900 has been announced and no community developed app is available.

The more we can stay result oriented, the more useful this community can be.

...which actually works against those wanting more for their legacy devices.

There's no getting around the fact that this is a Maemo forum. Not Android. Not iPhone. Maemo bashing threads are naturally going to be poorly received, and self-assuring positive posts easily tolerated. Nature of the beast, and fighting it is futile.