I guess I was one of those involved in the alpha phase you speak of. I love that right off the bat, some decent to excellent software is going to be available from the community. What's really amazing is this... if we're just STARTING with software like gPodder, Hermes, liqbase... just imagine a year down the line. Now imagine two.

What also blows my mind is looking at the "Crowdsourcing Translations for Maemo Packaging" thread I started a day or two ago asking for community help for translations. Look at the people that submitted translations. Quite a few of them were either relatively new users or used their first post to respond... before the device is even in their hands or even released.

Maemo as a whole has been incredible from the start. It's only going to get even better over time.

they did give you some info. They said end of october. It is end of october and release appears imminent. If you would have just believed the source instead of all the rumors, you would not be begging and on the edge of sanity right now

That's an interesting observation. I've not paid much attention to the "deal breaker" posts, mostly because I know what I have in the N810 and everything I see is an expansion/improvement over that. I'm also looking forward to messing around with QT (I haven't programed anything more complicated than an Access DB since high school, and I've tried to learn C in the past only to get frustrated shortly after "hello world"), but I'm thinking of a few specialized programs that might be fun to mess with.

In fact, the only thing that would be a deal breaker for me at this point is if the browser has a lot of fatal flaws, or the whole machine has some BSOD-like bug that would cause it to lock up or crash. But I've seen the stability of Linux and the N8xx platform, and even though this is a major update, it's still Maemo Linux at the core.

But I guess I'm a patient person. I was hoping it would ship this week so I could have it for a convention I'm going to next week, just to try my hand at blogging from the event, but I can still do 90% of that with my N95 and laptop, it just won't be as new and exciting -which may be a good thing, since I can focus on the convention instead of the new toy.

It is interesting how much the iPhone has changed the conversation though. Since Apple released the SDK (actually since the jailbreakers came along would be more accurate), the focus for the entire industry has been third party applications. I have an N95 that has a few 3rd party apps, and that was considered odd even a few months ago. Ringtones were about the only downloaded thing for most people. The IT is something else... a phone you can program yourself, if you're so inclined. The first time I type sudo gainroot in the terminal and see that I have the power to rm -rf / (but I won't) will signal a massive change in the cellular handset industry, even if most people won't understand why. I guess I think it is better to focus on what it can do (and is capable of doing) than what it can't right now today.

Now hurry up and ship the darn thing!

Altough I had a Duke Nukem moment a few days ago, I am fine with waiting until the device is ready.

I am not questioning Nokia's commitment to FOSS, but I do believe those principles extend into marketing and community interaction. After a 1500 posts long thread I would think some kind of reaction should happen. How about a news entry. Or a sticky thread.

Nokia is in a cleft stick, though.

If they don't provide a date, people will ***** and whine about it. If they do provide a date, there's a risk they won't make it, and people will ***** and whine more.

If they provide even vague information about what they're tidying up before release people will be "OMG it's got this glitch (or that glitch or the other glitch". If they don't provide information, they're being secretive and shadey.

We have people saying "I want it yesterday" and people saying "They shouldn't release a device without full portrait mode". Well, you can't have both.

In a perfect world, they'd design a completely bug-free device, which would ship on exactly the date planned without any issues. I suspect that what other manufacurers do is not actually supply a release date until the device is 100% ready, then waste a few weeks building up marketing hype. In the sense that nokia told us "We'd like to have it ready by ddmmyy but might not... oops, no - we found something and need to sort that first" they are being more open.

None of which solves the problem for people who were buying because they needed it for a certain deadline, but that's not really Nokia's fault.

The sad thing is, I was right: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...093#post355093

But still no news entry or sticky post or really an explanation.

I understand that Nokia probably did everything to not delay the device but again why not be more open about it? As of right now there is no bug in bugs.maemo.org that is labeled 'blocker'. (at least not for the N900)
So why the hold up?

Maybe the vagueness is related to the industry-wide component shortage that they mentioned when the Q3 results were published? It could be quite complicated to sort out if several different components are at a short supply.