I am not sure who to point fingers at regarding backward compatibility or backporting. The simple fact is, other operating systems like the Android/iPhone gets the updates which run on older hardware. A few days back I saw a G1 running the latest Eclair. Nokia is probably doing something wrong since I haven't seen Fremantle running on any of the previous NITs. Please don't say it's an Internet Tablet. We are taking about software, software that is open source. Makes you wonder why we don't have a massive following like the Andriod.

Its not about the hardware capabilities or such. Maemo 6 (aka Harmattan) will be fully Qt based (Maemo 5 aka Fremantle is not). It makes sense for Nokia to fully pay their attention and energy towards the Harmattan release for such big and new features. You would not want them to develop code which they wont care after a new release, right. And I am almost sure that Harmattan will be officially released for the N900.

I would even go further saying that once the Qt-based Maps application is ready, even the Symbian phones will get another new update. This is the advantage of going with Qt. You develop only once but deploy on multiple OS's.

I have been holding off buying an N900 so far to see how it develops. I was really excited about it but I start to think that it may have been a good thing that I haven't bought one yet..

I see Nokia's dilemma, they only have have so much resources they can/want to commit to Maemo and at this point they don't want to invest too much in developing things for Mameo 5 since they have to take these resources away from Maemo 6 development.

I think it would make a lot of sense for Nokia to officially confirm that Mameo 6 will work on the N900. If they did that I would probably buy one now. If they are planing to release the device (N920?) at the end of the year they pretty much know at this point what hardware they will be using, so they know if the N900 will be able to run Mameo 6. Sure, the Mameo 6 device will have multi touch, but it is not such a huge engineering feat to design the UI framework such that it works with and without multi touch.

Come on Nokia, give the people here (who work tirelessly on improving and marketing your product.. mostly for free) some official information.

In the meantime, we have all purchased a half-baked product and are on our own to solve the problems until Harmattan comes along, possibly a year or more later. That is only if Harmattan is even released officially for the N900. Personally, I'm seeing too many will-fix-in-Harmattan decisions to hang around and give it a chance (out of fear it'll be the same situation all over again). I love what Maemo is, but Nokia needs to not keep us in the dark and give us a clue as to what the future holds, if they can't bring the device up to par and/or start fixing more problems today.

17 posts have been merged from the thread [Under development] Ovi Maps - Turn by Turn Navigation

Now, let me summarize the situation from a technical point of view (if you are looking for a business point of view you will need to ask a business representative).

- In the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit we announced the Nokia strategy of Maemo and Symbian adopting Qt for their application frameworks in order to provide a common API. One day apps will run in Maemo and Symbian seamlessly or with little porting effort.

- A lot of information was shared in the Maemo Summit about Harmattan / Maemo 6, including OMAP3, OpenGL ES, capacitive screen support and multitouch UI. See http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009 and feel free helping me extracting the useful information at http://wiki.maemo.org/Open_developme...dmap/Harmattan

- It is also known that the Maemo 6 API will have it's baseline in Qt, with several variables to be defined in the first Harmattan SDK releases: compatibility of plain Qt APIs, selected Qt Mobility APIs, a Web runtime running on top of Qt-WebKit and an additional framework running on top of QGraphicsView.

- There was a timeline announcing a Harmattan alpha SDK release in 1Q2010 and a beta in 2Q2010.

- It is also known that Qt 4.6 is in its way of becoming officially supported in Maemo 5. Of course this Qt release for Maemo comes also with Qt-WebKit, QGraphicsView and the rest of the official Qt release. All these components are already in Extras-devel.

- Then in the Nokia Capital Markets it was announced that a Maemo 6 product will be delivered in 2H2010.

In my opinion all this is actually a lot of information already given about 'the next product' just when 'the current product' is hitting the shelves. Customers always want to know more! - I understand that, but you need to understand that we will keep informing about next releases and products when it's the right time.

And when it's the right time?

- In order to understand the compatibility between Maemo 5 and Maemo 6 at an API level at least a Harmattan alpha release needs to be out. From that point we will be able to discuss how easy/complex is to run/port apps between Maemo 5/6. This topic is specially interesting to developers in order to organize their work.

- In order to understand the compatibility between the N900 and the Maemo 6 product coming later this year such product needs to be announced.

I recommend you to enjoy Maemo 5 and to keep helping improving it (enjoying the act of collaboration as well). It works as advertized and it has plenty of potential - a potential that in big measure depends on yourselves. If you prefer to keep speculating that's fine but it is advisable that at least you enjoy while you are at it. Really, nobody is obliged to come here to suffer.

http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/
I beg to differ. I'm sorry, but this point on the N900 advertising page was a large reason for my initial interest and is still inaccurate. It's false advertising. Ok, technically there's nothing completely false about that: it's just a huge exaggeration, and fails to mention that "oh, by Ovi Maps, we mean a broken, half-assed version of the program known as Ovi Maps on other phones."

Generally Maemo 5 and the N900 is a good product, but this is one area where "Fixed in Harmattan" is simply not acceptable to me unless Harmattan is coming to the N900.

<capitalization>thank you!!!!!</capitalization>

By "indicators" you mean, of course, the official announcement of support in Harmattan.

As for the quote from BCN, well, it's in Spanish and, no, I don't have a source handy but I was sitting next to Anidel, lcuk and VDVsx and we can all corroborate what we heard.

For me, the biggest issue I have is that the reasoning that's generally been provided for not releasing Maemo 6 on the N900 is, well, bogus. Multitouch is no justification, it's a marketing reason, not a technical one.

Any business justification is, frankly, also pretty bogus. Nokia's continued insistence on jettisoning the majority of their existing customer base with each successive product release (which is a behavior that's, amazingly, getting worse each year and not better) is both short-sighted and an excellent way to counteract whatever community building efforts they've invested by making early developer-oriented releases of their R&D platform. The number of disgruntled 770 owners who will never touch Maemo again is both disheartening and astounding. Nokia's great opportunity to pull in large swaths of the free software community was squandered away by shortsighted "business" decisions. Seeing how much worse that is with the N810 and will be with the N900 is just depressing.

I love this platform and this community, but Nokia's marketing-driven platform decisions with the N900 and its successor are going to make me look elsewhere for my mobile devices in the future.

1) What Nokia should be doing with maemo is evolving it and ensuring maemo 5 apps will run on maemo 6 without modification.

2) Ensure maemo 6 can run on the n900. QT is just another library. The gtk-based library should be regarded as legacy - and the preferred option to develop to QT. There is no technical reason why multi-touch should inhibit the ability to upgrade an older version of the OS.

3) Nokia will actually increase the volume of applications available for future devices - Apple, Google and Microsoft can do this. If nokia cannot do this then kiss the smartphone/tablet market goodbye.

4) I'm sure this will pee-off developers if they have to re-compile and tweak their software again.

I have just forked out £500 for the n900 is Nokia telling me I have to do this again to get the next OS upgrade. No thank-you I'm off to android if that is the case.