I think its ridiculous that the whole hacker edition hangs on one man's shoulders. so if he gets mono or something, we won't see another hacker edition til next year...if ever.

That's more like it.

I want to e-mail this guy and beg him to get on this hacker edition stuff. Hmmm, maybe he can be bribed with cookies and or.... more cookies......... perhaps.

Yes. Nokia should relocate Maemo development to Brazil instead of moving people to Finland. The Brazilians are already doing all the good work anyway.

Seriously. I'm not expecting Nokia to allocate any of their very limited corporate budget (HahhaHahah... oh god, I'm crying.) to anything such as this but spit out a kernel that includes the 770 hardware modules and get it to boot to a shell.

so I've read a little about the 770 in the past (with no clue about these forums), and saw buy.com clearing it out knowing the 800 was released. I see it as current on Nokia's website so I'm figuring the 800 is just an improved model with better processing and internals, more memory, updated exterior, and better i/o capabilities. So I take the plunge for it on the cheap not really thinking much about not having the ability to return it as buy.com clearly stated that it can't be returned and that nokia will take care of any issues. Didn't think that was a problem as it's still a current product and has a one year warranty.

So now that I'm ready to dive into using this, I roam the net for forums and such, and I come across this place. Well all I am now is ticked off knowing I have an EOL'd product who's OS isn't compatible with its successor and has no real future of firmware updates. No mention of any of that on the Nokia site or the buy.com description. I'm all for buyer beware, but what about a little disclosure from the company about its intentions for the product?

Outside of the few philosophy posts claiming people are whining, it is not unreasonable to expect a product to be supported for more than a year, to be supported while it is still actively being sold and listed as current on their website. It is not unreasonable to assume that an updated OS for it's replacement should work on it as well. Maybe new features not on the 770 won't be operable, but the general core and feature set should be there. Most wm5 devices work with wm6 and that was supposedly a big deal of an upgrade. Why would a 06 and 07 in this case be such different animals? That part to me doesn't seem to make sense in all this back and forth. Unless there are specific hardware incompatibilities between the two, I can't imagine why they would improve the OS to alienate the previous model. That just doesn't make sense. And to hear their answers and depend on third party support for general problems and bugs is just nuts.

I think I'd be justified in sending my unit back to Nokia and demanding a full refund because it's almost fraud as nowhere in the descriptions on Nokia's or buy.com's sites mentioned the state of the product.

You have valid arguments that we've all argued in the past. Even so the 770 in it's current state is a very usable product and by far my favorite gadget at the moment and the foreseeable future. The current firmware is good, sure there are some quirks but those quirks are not as common as some might lead to believe.

Unfortunately for Nokia it's too bad they treated 770 users as 2nd class citizens when they released the N800 and some of this "save face" blogs and such they've been trying to do lately with the 770 basically falls under the "too little too late" category. Therefore because of this I probably won't purchase an N800 or another Nokia product ever again and will wait for competitive alternatives that are expect to start appearing over the next 6-12 months.

I think fraud is quite a tall accusation. I'm all but positive that nowhere does the law require a company to disclose their intent to develop firmware updates at the point of sale. Nice try, though.

It makes perfect sense to me for them to develop a new OS for the new system. It's a new system...it SHOULD run a different operating system than the older model, it's new. I would assume that the new OS is optimized and designed specifically for the hardware changes made to the n800, so why have an officially maintained release for the 770?
As far as leaving it with bugs...does no one realize that every version of Windows (Or Mac OS, for that matter) ever released was buggy right up until the stores stopped stocking it? 98 was a mess, Millenium Edition was a nightmare, and people still using those systems (yes, there are some left) are stuck with little for tech support and nothing in the way of updates or fixes. Yes, this system appears to have had a blazingly fast turnover, but hardly criminal. This is a very young sector of home computing, and I would expect advances here to be pretty rapid.

So, as mad as you might be about the "injustice" you've suffered by purchasing the 770 without being notified beforehand that Nokia has no plans to release further firmware upgrades, consider this:

You just spent $130 on a gadget that, with a little work, has all the functionality (and then some) of other devices that cost three+ times as much, as well as a monstrous library of third party applications and mods that make this monster well worth the literal chump change you've dropped.

In short, though I haven't received mine yet, I don't think it's the disaster that some of you see it as. The 770 will still work, you'll still have a great piece of tech gear that will make even your nerdiest friends jealous, and there will still be a community out there devoted to furthering the development of the tablet. Besides, now that people can pick them up dirt cheap, perhaps some of the brave folk out there will come up with hardware mods that will blow us away.

Or maybe the TOS2006 source will be released to the public at large and the 770 will become truly open source, which will in turn solve world hunger and bring peace to all on earth.

Edit: After reading through all of the posts in this thread in all its...glory? I'm somehow compelled to point out that I've never owned anything but a Nokia cell phone, and probably never will. One of my phones was fully submerged in water and was working just fine when it came out. Another was hit by a full swing with a 9 Iron and was, once again, just fine. In my experience Nokia provides durable, high quality devices, and my experience with my most recent phone (the 6165i) is no different. I will continue to purchase Nokia phones exclusively...call me a Fanboy, but I love the darn things, and I can't imagine feeling any differently about the 770, future software support or not. After all, it does what I want it to straight out of the box...that's the entire reason I'm buying it. I've got my old desktop running Ubuntu for the benefits of a Linux distro's splendor...I want the tablet for just what it is, a ridiculously portable web browser that just happens to be usable for taking notes, watching movies, listening to music, and of course a bit of DOOM multi player during those boring classes.

I have been reading this forum for the last 6 months... I also have been closely watching this specific thread. I have to say, because of the Woot.com sale, I picked up 2 - 770s.

It is still a capable product and I think that even with some development issues, its worth it.

I just got my 770 today through the buy.com & GCO deal. Coming from handheld pc's and pocket PC's running windows CE, this is a big improvement in performance for me. Toshiba, Dell, HP, and pretty much any other company involved with Pocket PCs dropped support once their new devices came out. A few devices were offered upgrades to the next version, but most owners were stuck with a device that was no longer going to be supported.
At least something is being done with the 770 as far as development goes, even if it is an unofficial hacked version. If this device had a Windows CE variant on it there would be little if any hope of further developement.