"Agent Simmons: Ooh. Nokia's are real nasty. You've gotta respect the Japanese. They know the way of the samurai.
Maggie Madsen: Nokia's from Finland.
Keller: Yes, but he's, you know, a little strange. He's a little strange. "

You know, maybe they just don't have the inventory. What if they completely underestimated demand for Maemo, noticed all the buzz in July and August, and are now shitting their pants.

Excess demand is not a good thing. What if Maemo outclasses S60 so badly that a significant portion of the market decides to go for the N900? Sounds good, but what if production is still ramping up? Suddenly S60 devices are rotting on the shelves, and there are no N900:s to be sold. They could still absorb the costs of excess inventory, but selling nothing they'd probably make a loss for several quarters.

Worst case scenario, the permanently unavailable N900 makes the N97 look so bad that people get a negative association with a perfectly decent platform and go for Android instead, even if they actually would have been happy with S60 had they never heard of Maemo.


Edit: refusing operator customization is obviously not related, imho. One more processor generation and your phone and the hotel's HDTV just replaced your laptop. Nokia absolutely cannot let the operators screw with what they're going to push as the next general computing platform.

lol thanks for the response, but if i was Nokia i think i would have just kept my mouth close they really need to stop butt f**king Symbian and let both platforms co-exist without downplaying maemo if thats what this was all about.

if not my apologies Nokia lol

Ok, I have just made up my mind about buying the N900. I will buy it. I was thinking about the "step 4/5" thing, but after considering several things, i don't want to wait that long and i can't really too. Nokia N900 starts selling in October. Nokia N920 will arrive within 9,5 months from now, sometime around June 2010. From what i understood it will be basically a N900 with many software updates and a newer Maemo 5 UI. Maemo 6 will arrive in eta spring 2011, more less. So all in all, waiting for the N920 would be for me stupid, because it won't be a dramatical change like from 810 to 900, more less polishing the N900 for the average consumer. Plus the N900 will get several firmware updates for sure, at least one coming this year around November/December and one being already in retail. So, in the very end, i don't want to wait 1,8yrs for Maemo 6 devices with some S60 phone aside. I will get the N900 and live with it minimum 2,5 years, like i live with every phone i buy. So, just saying that, the N900 will rock

Mind sourcing these dates? As far as I'm aware, no announcements have been made about any of those items.

Yeah, and the rumors I've heard place Maemo 6 in Q4 2010.


Edit: going completely from memory of rumors, I also had the impression the next Maemo 5 device is coming in Q1.

And what does firmware upgrade mean for the Nxxx-series anyway? Is it just phonespeak for dist-upgrade?

The first thing I thought when I saw the N900 (in the maemo.nokia.com website) was that they had a "N97 killer" (as opposed to the iPhone Killer everybody looks for).

After some videos, reading the forums and all that, I really thought they had the said iPhone Killer (The TV-out option + OpenGL is just great! A unadvertised gaming platform!). But if they drop support, and they try to focus again on their high-end symbian devices...

I think we'll have to wait and see.