(apologies for cross posting, thought this was relevant for the followers of this thread.)

For those of you interested in the project to amongst others, bring Fremantle components to N8x0(w) (and possibly 770 - we had X working + hildon booting last night) and continuing to have active OS development for these devices, we're having a bootstrapping meeting Sunday to get the project kicked off.

There's need for all sorts of people, ranging from artists(themes, icons, artwork), packagers, general developers, people with interest in user experience on tablets, to kernel/initfs hackers - and all of these exist in the tablet community.

More information can be found in this thread

Not to point to the obvious here, but the US lags behind Europe (esp. UK) with respect to mobile broadband usage (or so we are told). Hence why the iphone sales in europe were much better once the 3G version arrived.
I reckon it is more likely to have an n900 then an n910x when whatever x is (looks like it isn't wimax) given in europe the investment of the 3G infrastructure the providers have.
(I believe that the old iphone caused problems because stations had to be retrofitted with edge technology, when they were already HSDPA (or what ever 3.5G is, I get confused with all these names!)

I completely disagree. I found Benson's post to be very objective. What he appears to be "trying very hard" to do is enunciate clearly in order to avoid misinterpretation of meaning and motive. Looks like the latter fell short with at least one reader...

The first iPhone, exclusively sold together with a ATT contract, allows max EDGE which is an extension to GSM/GPRS and slower than later released HSDPA standard. The first iPhone was not sold in Europe. In Europe many telcos have already rolled out HSDPA before the first iPhone was released. The iPhone 3G can be bought without a bundle because of legal obligations in [some] European countries. However, the App Store does not include the tethering application because ATT does not allow this. As seen on a recent presentation by Nokia, Nokia has a market penetration of ~ 50% in Europe and Asia; in US only approx 10%. The upgrade path after HSDPA and HSUPA is HSPA+ which is rolled out in Australia, and now also starting to be rolled out in Sweden and Denmark. After that its time for LTE deployment.

It was sold in Europe. Not very successfully, but still...

Okay. This is the same BS Sharp pulled with the Zaurus SL5500. "Look, look, cool geek device". Then, bam, discontinued. "No worries" said the community, we can use the source from the Open version of the Qtopia project... except what actually happened was:

1) Trolltech carried on on their own merry dance, did some cool things with Qtopia - even released a ROM for the SL5500.... except there was no software available for the ROM because the ABI was broken.

2) Sharp released most of their source, but left various parts closed (e.g. the SD Card driver) which then basically screwed the community. A lot of hacks went in to then support the legacy driver in later versions of community OS projects.

3) Opie was born - a forked Qtopia... except it never really worked properly. There were a lot of driver issues and general weirdness. They also based it on a version of Qtopia that didn't have the Sharp 3.10 ROM changes in to, and it was annoyingly missing key features because of that.

4) Sharp released a backport of the SL5600 ROM and labelled it 3.10. At first Opie used the same basic ABI and it was cool, and apps could be shared. Then Opie moved to the more modern 3.X line of GCC, and the 3.10 ROM was orphaned - even though it really was the better ROM IMO.

5) Another X based version of the ROM with whatever GNOME had as their older mobile platform was released and was completely incompatible with everything else.

The community was fragmented. The OS stagnated because the binary drivers became a really big issue in keeping the platform alive.

This is exactly what i see the N8x0 platform turning in to. Sucks. If I wasn't using the N800 for doing some mobile Mono based dev work, it would be on eBay as I type. I'm simply NOT willing to go through the total ******** that goes along with this situation. Give me a development platform I can install on my operating system of choice - without using a VMWare or similar emulation layer, and things might be different. However, being a Windows (day job) and Mac (home) bod, I'm not happy to use LINUX. Thank goodness Mono is now usable!!

Having seen the N97 being shown recently at the Barcelona event - a N9xx that used the same hardware design would be really nice. Pocketable, touch screen designed for fingers. Qwerty keyboard. Nice camera. Nice multimedia. Imaging, an N970, N97 running Maemo! That would be interesting.

Except we don't have binary drivers, Nokia is dedicated to providing support to the community edition and Maemo is way more open than anything Sharp ever shipped.

And the Zaurus community is still alive and supported by the Angstrom distro (based on OE). The Sharp Zaurus sl-5x00(D) now has a 2.6.x kernel (despite all the Sharp release kernels being 2.4.x) and afaik the c7x0 devices now have some working hw acceleration (again working from no docs).

This is GPE, nothing to do with Gnome, except that it used an X server rather than drawing directly to the fb like Qtopia/Opie did.

Ehm, that is exactly what the N900 will have: pocketable, touch screen designed for fingers (Maemo 5 will focus on this), qwerty keyboard I admit we don't know, nice camera *check*, hs*pa *check*, nice multimedia *check*, and probably quite some diskspace as well. Imagine a N900 being a lot like N97! That would be interesting!

I don't understand why you're so excited about Mono. I rather see full Java support.

You're right that Sharp abandoned the Sharp Zaurus 5500. But this was also simply too slow, and there was still community support. Regarding N8x0 the only thing which slows down a community edition is the WLAN driver (which is now although incomplete also open source). Something like PowerVR is a bummer, I admit, but the way I see it Nokia is learning from the past so I give them the benefit of doubt. Besides that, I simply welcome the better performance. Welcome? I'm rooting for it!