Well, the good news is that The Onion finds this type of thing funny. The better news is that the iPhone will probably upgrade-outdated before your 770 is "dead", I hope!

http://www.theonion.com/content/news...at_work_making

Apple Hard At Work Making iPhone Obsolete
February 12, 2007 | Issue 43•07
CUPERTINO, CA—Only a month after the much-heralded announcement of the iPhone, Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed that his engineers were already working around-the-clock on the touchscreen smartphone's far-superior replacement. "We looked at [the iPhone's] innovative user interface, the paradigm-shifting voicemail, the best-in-class mobile browser, and we realized we could make all that seem ridiculously outdated by the time the product becomes available to customers in June," said Jobs, who described the project as "Apple reinventing the iPhone." "When the second-generation iPhone comes out this fall, we want iPhone users to feel not just jealous, but downright foolish for owning such laughably primitive technology." Jobs also hinted that the second iPhone device would not be compatible with existing Mac computers, third-party peripherals, or any future Apple products.

Guys, i have to agree that the 770 is long but dead. If you look at it from a functional point of view. What does worry me is that forums like this one, but also Nokias own maemo.org, suddenly is swamped with n800 messages. It looks like there was definitively a focus shift from the Nokia guys. Yes, there was a firmware upgrade just last week, maybe this was the last upgrade because dev time needs to be spent on n800 development?
I am currently cleaning up the old Nokia770.com forums, just because i think that soon there will be no place for us anymore here. This is the "bleeding edge" of IT users and we, old buddies with our outdated gear, don't belong here anymore. Soon maemo.org will go the same way.
Anybody here ever bought a Newton? It seems that the usergroup is very close and there is still some development being done on those devices. On low-traffic forums, in newsgroups, etc.
Is the 770 the next Newton?

Have fun with your 770. So do i. I love her and she loves me. ;-)

Ton.

IMO the whole problem, or at least a major part of it, probably stems from the very top of the Nokia administration, who probably can't be bothered to treat the 770 (and N800?) as completely different to one of their cell phones: "dissatisfied with an old one? buy a new one!" Just my 2c.

And that's what we do, no? Giving them the ethic AND business right to say these things. The n800 arrives and hey, everybody moving from the 770 to the n800. Including the developers.
So if we are so unhappy with this attitude, why don't we make a statement, stay with the 770 and DEMAND that Nokia develops whatever they are developing for the n800 for the 770?

But then again, that's us, and we are not the masses. The masses will obey to what the market drivers (Microsoft for IT, Nokia for phones) want. Even if it takes throwing away your one year old device (PC or Internet Tablet) and toss out the money to get the latest and greatest even though it's buggier than the previous one.

Amen to that. While we're complaining about the 770/N800 saga, M$ is out making operating systems that run on basically nothing older than a few months (at most).
I'll definitely stick with my 770. When I get it back from repairs that is

People have tried that, it didn't work apart from getting Nokia to provide OS 2007 on 770 in an unsupported and semi-working form.

I think Nokia have learned from the 770 to N800 transition and will hopefully not make this mistake again when releasing any successor for the N800. If they make the same mistake again, then they deserve all the aggro they will undoubtedly receive. But that scenario is way into the future, and worrying too much about it now is not likely to be productive as there's little we can do about it - it's a fundamental Nokia business and technical issue which we will not be privy too in any shape or form.

Milhouse, I'm sure you know that we're talking about Nokia, a company with a long history and a lot of experience in providing hardware/software in mobile space, not a new startup.
It seems that they really expected everyone to jump ships and buy a N800 as soon as they announce it. The issue is that they can't expect to maintain a community (which actively contributes back), if they leave previous generations behind without addressing their serious bugs.
We all know that they've practically ignored 770 Bugzilla and concentrated on the next product, N800. How many sane people would keep buying a new tablet, if Nokia repeats this every year?

The worse? Those who can't stop singing N800 praises hoping to get a N900 or whatever it is for free, perhaps.
It is a very good idea to highlight the benefits of a new product and encourage the manufacturer to continue with improvement and innovation, but a community (Maemo, Internet Tablet users...) grows through constructive criticism, identifying pitfalls and helping to fix them; that's what's lacking in these love-bird postings that bear no meaningful message for anybody (and I'm not referring to you).

You're right.

However, I didn't buy a Linux-based device innocently. It wasn't absurd to consider Maemo as a platform, which older devices would benefit as newer versions come out.

Well, Nokia's policy didn't surprise me a lot, though. They try to bind software obsolescence to hardware obsolescence. I should have expected that. I still think Nokia 770 is a great product, and I probably would have bought one nonetheless. It was a good attempt to approach my needs of accessing the Internet in a more ubiquitous way, which means forgetting the device and prioritizing content--depending less on place and time. And it was well-designed and not so expansive.

Now, as a consumer of the Internet, I realize that some of my primary needs rely on proprietary technology, that is, RealAudio and Flash. As opposed to some other people, I don't really care about Nokia fixing bugs on OS 2006. It is quite usable already. I am more concerned with Flash upgrading, I mean, with basic features that make an Internet tablet obsolete in a year if outdated. With closed-source, rapidly evolving technologies, Nokia is able to choose when to make such a device obsolete.

I am more concerned with proprietary technologies on the web than Nokia's loyalty towards consumers, though.

iFrank - that's pretty much Nokia policy though. Backward compatability is an after thought even on their mobile phones, is it any surprise that they applied the same strategy to the Internet Tablet? Look at a Symbian S60 phone - is it compatible with the later S60 FP1? No it's not. Can you upgrade your non-FP1 phone to S60 FP1 and thus make it compatible with the latest S60 software? No, you can't. Nokia expect owners to upgrade every 12 months or whenever the contract expires.

I'm not saying it's right - God no, I'm not saying that at all. In fact I hope Nokia have learned a very important lesson with respect to Internet Tablets and their future support policy (as much as I hate to say it, the 770 is what it is and it isn't going to change - for the N800, maybe there is still hope).

Nokia have promised to fix the bugs in OS2006 and Ari has said (in his roadmap) that they will pay more attention to the public Bugzilla - hopefully this means Nokia *will* address the outstanding 770 bugs otherwise their credability will reach zero. For the sake of the 770 they sacrificed the platform... not good, if it happens!

Only time will tell, but I see little point fretting and worrying at this stage about what Nokia may or may not do in 2008 with the successor to the N800. What they do about the 770 is worth worrying about now however, but it does get tiresome when people (and I don't mean you! ) beat the same drum day in day out - we know that Nokia can only churn out new firmware every 2 to 3 months so all I'm saying is let's give them time to prove their word is of some value!

This is what I don't understand. When you bought the 770, it came with Flash 6 which works well enough but obviously doesn't support youtube etc. Nokia never promised the 770 would support youtube (ie. Flash 7+) so what's changed? The 770 worked when you bought it, and it still works - if it wasn't good enough when you bought it, you shouldn't have got a refund. There was never a promise that Flash 7+ would be supported so expecting that was misguided.

The only thing that has changed recently is that Nokia have now brought out a more capable device which does support Flash 7+/youtube - what direct consequence has this had on your usage of your 770? If the new device hadn't come out, would you still be upset that the 770 didn't work with youtube? I bet you would not.

To me, this sounds more like a perceptual issue - the new device can do it, I want it too. The reality is, your requirements have changed - you believe you now need Flash 7+, but when you bought your 770 you clearly did not (otherwise you wouldn't have bought it). This is not the fault of the device, or even Nokia - you have outgrown the device. Sell it on eBay and upgrade.