Originally Posted by konttori

/me takes his nokia hat on:
We haven't been very forthcoming about the content being created for the next releases of maemo 5. I can assure you, there is a lot of great content being developed, and you should be able to get your hands on it soonish.

Roadmap page is a great idea in my opinion, the only issue being in it the dates, which we don't want to commit to. But I'm sure a roadmap can be built without such. I'll take the action of following that up.

Originally Posted by ewan

I understand that, but some idea of dates would certainly be useful.

Originally Posted by konttori

/me takes his nokia hat on:
We haven't been very forthcoming about the content being created for the next releases of maemo 5. I can assure you, there is a lot of great content being developed, and you should be able to get your hands on it soonish.

Roadmap page is a great idea in my opinion, the only issue being in it the dates, which we don't want to commit to. But I'm sure a roadmap can be built without such. I'll take the action of following that up.

Originally Posted by konttori

We haven't been very forthcoming about the content being created for the next releases of maemo 5. I can assure you, there is a lot of great content being developed, and you should be able to get your hands on it soonish.

Roadmap page is a great idea in my opinion, the only issue being in it the dates, which we don't want to commit to. But I'm sure a roadmap can be built without such. I'll take the action of following that up.

Originally Posted by qgil

THIS IS A CONSTRUCTIVE THREAD IN THE COMMUNITY SUBFORUM. Repeated rants will be moved elsewhere.

It looks like almost any thread these days is good to derive in a "sure, but what about Harmattan/MeeGo running in the N900", followed by a chain of messages that don't contribute much more than bad community mood.

You can say: "It's all you fault". Ok, so be it. Now, can we move forward here in maemo.org?

While it is true that Nokia hasn't communicated Harmattan or MeeGo official support plans for the N900, it is also true that all the FUD is not helping the average N900 user following Talk. We are in the best momentum Maemo ever had, sales and countries of distribution are increasing, Nokia cares more than ever about this platform and the team pushing it, entities like Ovi or Forum Nokia are putting more and more resources... and then poor Joe reading posts here feels "abandoned".

Originally Posted by twaelti

Thank you for your post. Most of us really believe strongly in Maemo, trust you guys at the keyboards and appreciate very much what you did in the last year for the N900. It's just that Nokia's (visible) output dried up considerably over the last months since the release of the N900 (guess everybody had to catch up on holidays finally :-), with PR1.1 being just a "cosmetic" release for many (even if the devs here appreciate the finetuning of the framework etc.)

Nobody reasonable expects any date commitment, but why can't Nokia announce a feature roadmap like other software houses do? Quarterly estimates would more than suffice. And explain why some perhaps expected things won't show up (technical, economical, marketing reasons).

A purely hypothetical (but IMHO not entirely unreasonable) roadmap might just look like:

• Q4'09/Q1'10 (Winter): PR 1.1 Stability, critical fixes
• Q1/Q2 '10 (Spring): PR 1.2 Ovi Maps 2.0 (offline search, map loader compatible), QT 4.6, Ovi Store open for commercial apps. Google Sync compatibility. Flash 10.1 hardware-accelerated. Front-facing cam enabled for all possible protocols . Camera app with HDR mode. Assign custom ringtones to contacts. MediaPlayer with Equalizer and vastly improved playlist editor.
• Q2/Q3 '10 (Summer): PR 1.3 Ovi Maps 4.0 (voice navigation, based on QT 4.6, feature equivalent to Symbian). Full portrait mode for major Nokia Apps. MMS. Open sourcing of selected Nokia Apps under a slightly restricting licence to protect IP.
• Q3/Q4 '10 (Autumn) : PR 2.0 MeeGo for N900 (Paid upgrade @ 10 EUR)
• Q4'10/Q1'11 (Winter): PR 2.1 Stability, critical fixes.
• ...

(Again: just an example)

Such a roadmap would be a great marketing help against FUD, as it would show the extent of Nokia's commitment and assure potential buyers of the "long-term" potential of the platform. You want people to keep buying N900 until the next device comes, or not? So the buzz must be kept alive, and this can only be done by releasing head-turning updates, therefore each release MUST feature at least 1-2 "supersexy" features (the bold items on my hypothetical roadmap are such examples)

Last but not least, the roadmap might also be useful when closing bugs in the maemo bugzilla, as we might more clearly see an indication when to expect a fix released.

(BTW: I will PM you on how to coordinate my Wiicontrol fixes :-)

Originally Posted by spanner

IMHO your post - in the context of this thread - undermines the lesson I'd like Nokians to take from it: that partial information is better than no information.

Originally Posted by Freemantle

So, could the community please stop giving the N900 a bad public image

Originally Posted by ewan

The community is not doing that. If the lack of communication from Nokia is giving the device a bad image then the fault is with Nokia's lack of communication, it is not with the community's talking about it. We don't make things better by hiding problem if it's real.