its just a phone..ok? Not like you spent 50k on a car and then heard that they arent going to cover the warranty and the company is going out of business. If youre that depressed about it, maybe you should make a quart of that Jim Jones Kool Aid.

Yup, hardware is OK, only firmware is almost "bug-free" and almost "complete", and almost "open source".... almost. But we paid the full price

hmmm, yea, sorry, beta was short for "step 4/5".

Think amongst youself, before PR1.2 was introduced, wasnt the device often fealt like an unfinished product that he was?
And even today, as so much users here pointed out, there are still a significant amount of bugs. Bugs that still, if this phone was called "Droid" "Iph*ne" or whatever would cause it to never see the light of day until fixed. So go ahead, dont call it beta.

It just seems daft to cease maemo support.

Although there are existing bugs in maemo, it was in a good position for Nokia to potentially launch some serious smartphone hardware.

If they launched another maemo-based device this year - e.g. slimline, keboardless, multi-touch phone and updated software.
Nokia could have had a "flagship" device for this christmas. The current Nx models have received "meh, so what?" reviews.

Many reviewers were excited about the n900 when it was launched last year and expected great things from Nokia.

Instead Nokia started the whole thing again with meego and a device won't be released until mid to end of next year (2011).

Utterly ******ed commercial decision.

no OS is without bugs. i cant think of one single bug that actually bothers me on a daily basis in maemo 5, so i would say it has been a pretty satisfactory experience thus far.

if you really want to see what "beta" looks like, download meego 1.1.

Steve Miller said it best: "Go on take the money and run".

Come on now... no one is changing anyone's mind by this "step 4 of 5" vs "beta/unfinished product"...... "smartphone vs mobile computer"..... etc.

Those arguments are already getting circular, let's all just drop them and find new points to go over and debate upon.

iirc it was at the maemo summit '09 when i heard it. (even if i wasnt there... but there's the internet, you know.) they said harmattan would use multi touch plus drm, so it was clear it wouldnt come to the n900.

but you're right: not man people got that message. a lot more people can clearly remember when nokia said "the n900 will get full portrait mode support, swype, flash 10.1, the symbian version of ovi maps, video calling, native mms, text2speech, voice dialling and one new surprise feature every other months".

If you're talking about the handset version, I'd say that's "alpha" at best.

See, I knew this would turn into a terrible, stupid thread. I should have reported it for being baseless and wish it had been locked 20 pages ago.