That's somewhat of a hot question at the moment. There's certainly plenty of community support at the moment, and the hope is that either Maemo 6 will be available for the N900, or that the majority of applications will be compatible with both (or trivially portable). The move to Qt4.6 as a cross-platform library for M5, M6, and Symbian should help in this regard. Nokia haven't given any concrete assurances yet though, so it's all a bit up-in-the-air. Failing that, community support could drop off pretty sharply I'm optimistic on that front though.

A quite incorrect, and sweeping statement. I myself am an "average user, with little linux knowledge" yet I am constantly amazed at this device, and thoroughly enjoying learning and playing with it daily.
I wouldn't swap it for anything on the market or even all three of it's main competitors.

i possibly should have said:-

If you are an average user, with little linux knowledge, and no interest in tinkering with linux to make things work, you'll find this device very underwhelming.

I'll take a wild guess that you are not a developer, hence the rubbish question `why should they waste their time developing...` Developing is not a waste of time, even if you don't get any money you gain knowledge and experience. Lots of us became developers by developing for free, for years. Next time when you visit any web page ask yourself the same question as more than 50% of the Internet runs on FOSS (Linux, Apache, Perl, PHP, Python...). There is also ~20% chance that you surf the web using something that's also FOSS (various Mozilla projects). And then there are projects like OpenOffice.org, The GIMP and tons of others - all of which are developed without charging a dime to the end users.

In the last decade I've primarily developed using FOSS solutions and contributing back to the community, and I'm getting a decent living out of it, thank you very much. You don't need to be able to sell your software to the end users in order to make money out of it. And even if you don't make any money in any way on your FOSS development, there are tons of other incentives to make you develop your software for free - community cred, learning, pimping up your CV, making useful contacts... I know quite a lot of people that make more than a decent living without selling a single line of their code to the end users.

Just because you don't understand it, or because it doesn't conform to the conservative way of doing business, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work.

Well I had a play with an N900 today and was very impressed feels a much better built device than I imagined!
I'm sure it will do all I want and I've always wanted to give Linux a try!

I purposely set my user agent to iPhone so I can get the mobile verisons of sites . . . doesn't use CBS much but mobile Mashable and Facebook rock!!!


If a site doesn't give you a link to switch from mobile to standard then they are not worth visiting

CNBC has a great website and I was able to view it in the desktop format on my N900 but the last few days I only get the mobile version.

It's odd and I tried to reboot, but still renders the mobile version but everything else comes in the desktop format.

Hi RevdKathy,

for Chrism_scotland who's already got the E72 I agree with you regarding the usefulness and features of the N900. However your description of voice dialing and individualised ringtones as "extremely rich phone features" and MfE as "obscure stuff" cracked me up.

why do u need two devices?

@Zwer

Easy tiger, I'm not having a go at the community developers, but, i do believe there is room for the community and commercial developers to co-exist.

in any case, one of your comments intrigued me:-
"I know quite a lot of people that make more than a decent living without selling a single line of their code to the end users."

how do these people make a decent living? You also say you make a decent living by developing? pretty tricky making a living by not getting paid for what you do.

If some developers don't need to get paid for their work, how come the Angry Birds level pack isn't back in the OVI store and being given away? How come we haven't seen more development houses jump on board and load up the repositories?