Do you believe you will be allowed to install custom software on that thing? :>

no apparently Sony are planning on selling psx and psp games for the phone...

No one in this thread has been trumpeting Android. It's just pretty clear that Android 2.2 implements Flash 10.1 fairly well, and in the face of press like this from the BBC, Nokia has clearly dropped the ball. It's nice to see Google seriously updating Android's featureset on phones after they've been out for more then six months. Owning a N900, it gets real stale hearing talk of unofficial N900 support for Meego coming soon... Can we hear just something about the operating system that is on our phones right now? It hasn't even been a year yet since the first device with Maemo 5 came out and Nokia's support seems nonexistent.

And "cultural degradation" of OS's? This cultural degredation is just the consumer moving on to the OS that gives them the features they want. That makes sense when you $500 for a phone, and then it loses support in six months. I cannot afford to love multiple OS's, it is too cost prohibitive. And I am not about to complain how degradation is hurting Nokia. I'm quite sure the biggest phone company in the world can sort that problem out!

Is the whole "American" thing really that necessary? I got a N900 and I'm American, although maybe idealism got the best of me in that purchase... Android isn't just sold in America and I don't think the dude in the BBC video was American. Nokia sells everywhere too, but when you aren't competing feature wise with others then there is a problem. What is becoming apparent is Nokia's lack of support for Maemo. I love the community here, and it is nice to see how much you believe in the N900. I just don't like any giant corporation enough to ignore the inferior support given to this device when compared to the other big name players. They didn't give me this device for free. And in this deal, I'm starting to feel like I really was the sucker...

P.S. That stutter seemed to only be present when starting and zooming the video, the phone seems to be doing a very good job for it running out of the box. I can't just zoom around on the page with flash videos on the N900 without problems and that's with a 1.15 ghz overclock.

YESSSSSSSSS

Yes well this being at an enthusiast forum, usually people here have the capital to change devices once a year and often do so. That's why I think sometimes people take what's happened with the N900 too seriously. For some reason for most the only outlet is finding out stuff that they're missing on, such as Flash 10 on Android. Why not appreciate and get interested about every option, because after all, as consumers we have all the power over manufacturers in terms of which devices we buy.

I kind of regretted saying that because you could interpret that as a very anti-American statement. I didn't mean it that way, I'm sorry if anyone thinks that.

I was referring to the fact that there's a bit of a trend these days where American bloggers gather all the attention (for eg. Engadget), and in the US the history of mobiles is very different (shorter) than in Europe. Sometimes I feel that all present-day events are regarded as if mobile history begun with the Motorola Razr. This thought didn't have much to do with the video, as yes the BBC is British, but I felt that it was being regarded with that limited way of appreciating mobile history. I feel that in the big picture Flash 10 support is just a nigglet of a feature that's somewhat missing from the N900 now.

I think we should also recognize that it is most likely that this feature by the BBC was a "paid ad" by either Google or Adobe. It's always a trade of somesort if not paid, such as views for the BBC site if they do this coverage.

and 99.7% of the webs video content, simply doesn't. and when it does, it looks like **** or stutters easily.

The vid in the link was smooth as silk after a few seconds, much better than the n900.

Remember nokia advertised the n900 as a phone which could seemlessly handle internet video.
It Can't.

I agreed with you until... Recently, I've noticed videos in Facebook now refusing to play, saying "sorry, you must upgrade to a newer flash version", with a link to Adobe to get the upgrade.

The link doesn't lead to anything useful for the N900 of course... Unless maybe the Debian version of flash works with Easy Debian?

It's disappointing that videos on BBC iPlayer don't seem to play, even when downloaded separately with get-iplayer. But that's never really worked.

As a device marketed partly for it's video capabilities, the N900 is remarkably poor at it, and getting worse as the web moves on.

The unit is very expensive. I expect for many here, it's too expensive to buy once per year.

Personally I can afford it - but my purchase cycle is about every 3 years. Just don't see why I should keep spending over and over on hardware just to get software updates, when the hardware I already own is perfectly good for it technically, and is only not getting the software because the manufacturer's business model is not in my interests.

Put another way: Why would a consumer throw a lot of money every year at a single manufacturer, when seeing that devices from other manufacturers get several years of active support, receiving most of the latest software toys during that time, making it much cheaper to keep up with the shiny stuff - and you get better shiny stuff anyway?

Most of the value as time progresses is in the software, not new hardware features at this time.

This might be true for the PC market, but not (yet) for mobile market.

But I thought the N900 was a pocket computer? Upgrades should be part of the computer philosophy, not just marketing terms to sell their product.

Computers are upgradeable typically.