i believe this was the worst end of tonight ,i had till date .
very much enough to make me sad .i will go where others go .where maemo goes .
And for meego,if they ( Nokia ) could not understand this presentation by stskeeps http://summit.meegonetwork.fi/speaker/carsten-munk then to me they probably are way over ours head ! dummies
i hope this is not a tactical approach by Nokia to first lure us towards meego and then kick towards WP7.

Great post Qole - depressing, but probably the most accurate post I have read on here for a while.

Given how Nokia seem to be crippling the sales/marketing of the N9, either by accident or conspiratorial design, and that for mere mortals like me the N950 will remain a mythical beast, the N900 does seem to be the end of the Maemo/Meego line. (BTW if anyone wants to chuck an N950 to a longstanding user, I'll catch it)

Currently I feel like I did when Psion pulled out of the PDA market, doomed my 5MXs to history. The community slowly ran out of steam and although there are a few diehards hanging on, the community really lasted only another year or two as the majority of the devices became too fragile to risk using in day to day use. I still have two which I pull out occasionally, stroke and wonder what might have been - N900 in another year (if not less) will be there as well.

To early for me to say what would/will replace it. Hopefully not for a while yet though.

N900's main feature to me is that it's like a little linux computer in my pocket. I quit using my laptop entirely after I bought the N900.

Android/Symbian/WinPhone/iPhone/etc are all too "smartphony" in comparison. If my N900 dies and I can't replace it cheap, I'd probalby go back to carrying a basic phone and dust off my laptop.

I really just want an N900 with more RAM.

edit: and I will add, since this post is reading like a eulogy for N900, that while the hardware specs and Linux are what drew me to it, it was the community and developers who made it truly useful and interesting. Thanks to each and every one of you.

I imagine I will find my self hmm-ing and haww-ing over various handsets, wishing they had the specs I want. Ogling various projects like the Freerunner and OpenPandora, waiting forever for things to come to fruition.

I'm probably going to lurch down the Cordia path, simply because that seems like the next most viable route, and I like supporting projects like this. Unless a major vendor comes out with a handset running MeeGo and actually participates in the community (and I can buy the handset directly instead of forced through the carriers,) I don't really see anywhere else to go.

I guess that the Two Cultures here are finally going to destroy the place. I think they are the ITT crowd, not particularly adoring Nokia, more user and less developer oriented, and the gung-ho Maemo and Meego fans, more developer and pro oriented, organization and discipline minded. Now that Nokia is ratting out their raison d etre, they would rather go down with the ship than return to the freewheeling ITT base.

Since maemo is obviously doomed to die, the only way to survive is to be more open to the ITT wave, but since that isnt acceptable to the hard core, fragmentation and decay seem inevitable.

Zaurus and OPIE redux.

Qole's post reminds me of the open Zaurus dayd, the initial euphotlria of an open build for the Zaurus but eventual slow death.

Without Nokia's support, th OS might still live (though not withiut the closed bits), but the hardware will die and eventually the community will die.

But i have hope for Linux in the pocket device. When the Zaurus died (one of the firt successful linux pdas), the despondency was same but the Linux momentum had started and then came nokia with Maemo.

Am sure after Nokia someone will still carry the handheld linux torch forward in some way. just maybe not as maemo/meego.

the Nokia N900 introduced me to the LINUX world. If it wasn't for the n900, I don't have a mobile device that runs on 600mhz-1000mhz, knowledge that you can have more than one OS in one device, Ubuntu, XP mode on my Win7 Laptop, I don't know what "Bricked" means, and a bunch of hacks and stuff......

I am

Great post. Honest and sobersome. After weeks (months?) of speculative threads around Meego/N9-N950 I came to realise that the N900 had already passed its expiration date. The broken USB thread came back to life, and more and more For Sale threads started.

With the refreshing wisdom and maturity injected that comes with each contributor in reply to Qole's commentary, it is quite a shame that this has to be witnessed at the end of such an era. I too am not hopeful that Meego will be championed by any other company and this N900 and Harmattan device is all we have left.

I joined this community quite late and feel like I missed the best years of Maemo. I will stalk this forum for another year only because strangely I find the people here far more interesting and 'open' minded than any other 'community' that exists. We discuss, love and hate Nokia/Maemo but come around at the end of the day to help each other.

I say let's enjoy what we still have. Maybe we have Meego, and if we do I dont see why talk.meego.org (TMO) can't exist

I know there are not many maemo developers out there and that they don't have infinite time, but I know there are still a few thousands of people interested in this device. We should coordinate our efforts towards something and cordia is one of our best shots. The thing is, when is it the right time to abandon current hardware and move into new one?

My thoughts is that we should inspect all devices that exist now and find the most suitable one i.e. one that

• is up to date
• has open bootloader
• has keyboard
• has already managed to run any form of linux pretty successfully
• has WVGA resolution

For example the htc hd2 may not fulfill the first rule but it's one of the most hackable devices out there and it runs android fully even if it was a windows device (really different architecture)

So after we decide which is the next reference device, we target all our efforts to have a usable meego-cordia (or could it be cordia over android kernel?? can android kernel be modifed to use X?)

If we succeed then this community can live on for two more years. The downside is that very little new people will come here (I came here because I got a N900, some users of the X device we choose will join, but surely it won't be the first forum they will find)

geneven, I honestly don't understand your point. I would love to go back to the "freewheeling ITT base" of these forums that I loved so much, but the ITT engine is out of steam; the Nokia products that spawned these forums are fading into history.