THIS IS A CONSTRUCTIVE THREAD IN THE COMMUNITY SUBFORUM.

It looks like almost any thread these days is good to derive in a "sure, but what about Harmattan/MeeGo running in the N900", followed by a chain of messages that don't contribute much more than bad community mood.

You can say: "It's all you fault". Ok, so be it. Now, can we move forward here in maemo.org?

While it is true that Nokia hasn't communicated Harmattan or MeeGo official support plans for the N900, it is also true that all the FUD is not helping the average N900 user following Talk. We are in the best momentum Maemo ever had, sales and countries of distribution are increasing, Nokia cares more than ever about this platform and the team pushing it, entities like Ovi or Forum Nokia are putting more and more resources... and then poor Joe reading posts here feels "abandoned".

So no, Nokians here in Talk can't answer to a business question like that. Still we can be helpful discussing whatever technical is relevant and helping removing FUD and bad mood from Talk.

So what about a "What can we realistically expect..." wiki page + thread under N900 subforum to discuss and summarize the flesh around this topic, and clean the many senseless arguments and noise we can read these days among valid and licit doubts and concerns?

Maemo 5 is still a viable platform.

Who knows when Maemo 6/MeeGo will be ready - it could be many months before something tangible is realised.

This is an open-source device which means the community can take the software in any direction we like.

I'm really happy with my n900 - I'm constantly using it and not having Harmattan or MeeGo available at the moment does not hinder it at all.

Not even long-term will this be a problem - there are many community members that care about the platform.

Over the past couple of months the speculation has got absolutely nowhere (I am guilty as anyone on this).

I suppose there is no point speculating what Nokia's plans are - I'd rather concentrate on the n900 itself.

As a developer I have been waiting to see what happens with the direction of Maemo - I have no idea what Nokia's plans are for the n900 but I will write software for the device anyway.

It's in my best interests to do so.

I think it's easy to feel abandoned because (as far as I know) there are no "official" plans to do anything other than minor bugfixes on this platform.

Maybe I just haven't found the "official Nokia announcement page" yet - can anyone point me to one?

I think it would really help if there was a simple, semi-official "roadmap" page that listed what we can realistically expect from Nokia, what "might" happen, and what's just make-believe (better Maps, Flash 10, QT 4.6, Maemo 6, etc). Is this what you meant, qgil? It's a great idea, but I feel that it will only add to the confusion unless it is backed by real information from Nokia.

At the moment all I know is hearsay from these forums, misleading chatter from the tech blogosphere and press releases from Nokia which may or may not apply to me (e.g. "Free navigation on your Nokia. Forever." ... what do I believe ???).

I think you've asked a really important question & I hope we manage to improve the atmosphere here.

So allay the fears, clear up the uncertainty, and remove the doubt.

The fears are reasonable. Nokia has a pretty clear track record of abandoning the older platforms, and simply saying "Please don't talk about our embarrassing lack of communication" doesn't actually solve the problem. I'm sure we all understand that you can't personally make the call to change this approach, but it is possible to change it, and if Nokia wants the FUD to stop, then someone who can make that call needs to make it.

Fundamentally, there's nothing "technical" that is relevant - this isn't a technical problem, it's a project management and community relations problem. Other commercial providers of free software (and, indeed, proprietary software) manage to do better at those things by not being as secretive as Nokia is. If you'd like their kind of outcome, you need to try their kind of approach.

I agree. While my belief in turn-by-turn, meego, portrait mode etc for the N900 is well below 10% at the moment, I still think that crying after these features now is like refusing to travel anywhere in the world until teleportation has been invented.

Sure, it will take a longer time to take that 10 hour flight today, but hey, no one knows exactly when teleportation will be available to the main-stream, so we might as well go ahead and travel the old-fashion way for now...

Thanks, Quim, for putting this straight.

What about a formal "Maemo" Nokia announcement page or even a link to a page at Nokia's site.

If it's not on the page then it's not official (hopefully the page won't stay blank!).

A simple request like this in theory stop the enormous amount of speculation in these forums.

For me this is the problem. Nokia just don't seem to communicate with the community (not in a formal sense).

Rather then relying on third-party blogs and quotes to get information we can go to a formal announcement page instead.

We can then hold discussions on the "announcement" page rather than using the forum.

If Nokia can communicate in a strong poitive way then it will be better for the community and become a more positive relationship.

A big part of the problem is that a lot of people are ready to believe anything someone posts here or in a third party blog.

Someone claims that some important guy from Nokia told him something at some conference and a dozen people reply with enraged posts as if it were a fact.

I think that we need to wait first for MeeGo project to release at least code and first testing root filesystems for any ARM device so we will be able to check how it works (never mind will it be pure console or X11 with just xterm).

Until that we should go back to speculations when next firmware drop for system which we are already using (read: Maemo5) will appear and will it fix bugs which we have or not (rather not) and how many new features we will get (few or less I think).

"Our" is a really big set. You mean Nokia executive management.

Quim's point as I understand it is that the decision is made high enough up that it's out of his hands, and ranting about it here is pointless at this time.