What can we realistically expect from Nokia....

That is a good question, realistically the product has been launched, received well by the target audience but in the end it will never be considered an "everymans" phone. So realistically besides minor updates nothing more should be expected of Nokia (this would be a mistake though).

Nokia has aligned itself with Intel which is a very smart move on both parties since Nokia would like to secure the latest and greatest hardware for its devices and Intel needs a mobile vendor to truly brake into the mobile market. That being said they have chosen a somewhat non-committal agreement with each other since instead of saying we will produce X device together they decide to create a platform from which they can produce products together or indeed separately. I am not saying they are not committed to the project but ultimately even if they don't produce a device in collaboration the software produced would be very useful for both parties. This could turn out to be very important for Nokia since although Intel chips are x86, therefore compatible with a large swath of software, ARM has been the platform of choice due to its high efficiency and its clever licensing to various companies (Samsung, TI, Qualcom) and a number of variations on the standard chip design (Snapdragon, Hummingbird). Still I can't see Intel just giving up on this lucrative sector, can you? In the end this is a smart business move but maybe not such a smart community move. This is akin to releasing a product and a day later having a press release stating its obsolete and a new one will be out within six months (Oh it has happened in the computer industry before). Still thinking this way would be missing the point. They did not come out saying we have developed a new phone but a new OS that is open to all and controlled by a community. Should they support the N900 with a MeeGo firware for it? That would be nice but ultimately unnecessary as long as, most bug fixes have been made and we are not left out in the cold with new software.

Personally I am reserving judgement until I see some actual hardware running MeeGo rather than this illusive vesper of an idea.

Still the experience with the N900 has been frustrating at times but ultimately very rewarding.

Great :-) We all seem to be in violent agreement here.

Isn't some sort of public roadmap a necessity for MeeGo anyway? I mean the fact that Nokia and Intel at least seem to be very interested about getting other hardware manufacturers on board for MeeGo. They can't really achieve that by being as secretive/economic about revealing future as Nokia has been about Maemo before. It's not just about one manufacturer anymore.

I would expect something similar to how Symbian Foundation reveals it's future plans. Nokia still dominates SF development, but can't really expect Samsung and Sony Ericsson to stay with Symbian without decent roadmap to guide other interested parties.

(That's just my very uneducated opinion/guess)

There are official plans and there are tentative plans. They haven't been communicated, but they exist.

It doesn't exist as for today. Still, you can check Bugzilla resolutions to have a glimpse of what is coming.

It is actually a common practice in the sector that Nokia operates not to make official announcements disclosing all plans about a released product.

Exactly.

We can summarize the information available from Nokia and others can help adding the unofficial but technically accurate information or views.

That very much depends if you think you're in the mobile phone sector, or the community supported open source OS sector.

I never said that. My intention starting this thread is to keep a sane discussion leading to somewhere new.

Still, not disclosing plans about a released product is a usual practice in the industry. Some people are saying 'I feel abandoned by your silence and I will go get a [conpetitor device]'. Still, do you know more about the [competitor] future plans? Has [competitor] made any official announcement about the future of their products in the market?

Hypothesis: without Maemo Summit, MeeGo announcement, Bugzilla and Brainstorm, probably the N900 FUD would be minimal at this point, even if the Nokia internals were doing exactly the same work they are doing today. Do you think this has a point? Nokia is frequently recalled to learn to deal with open development, but maybe users, bloggers etc might learn a thing or two as well.

URLs are welcome, specially from commercial competitors.

About 'technical problems', you could consider one the fact that most 'feared' users suffer FUD around "Harmattan", "MeeGo", "Qt", etc when they actually have little idea of the technical implications of all this. And we end up with people thinking that they need MeeGo in order to get Ovi Maps with free navigation. Or wondering why Ovi Maps with free navigation could be offered in nn existing Nokia devices (Symbian based) the day of the announcement while the N900 still hasn't got it.

The lack of technical clarity becomes more than a technical problem at the end.

So why don't you promise Ovi Maps with free navigation on N900 if you want to aleviate the fear that without Harmattan, N900 won't get Ovi Maps with free navigation?

Who is the "you" in that question, Matan? Surely not Quim.

No joke. No one gives Apple or HTC endless streams of what we get here over lack of discussion regarding future software. They are continually dead silent on how older devices are to be treated. I've never seen so many people panic and spread FUD about a product's future like they have here. Granted, some of them are long time users who are extrapolating past behavior by Nokia, so it's not -all- unfounded, just most.

N900 hardware, "Official support", upgrading kernel drivers, Ovi Maps, Flash, Nokia apps, industry certifications... most of this discussion is about commercial topics, even when they sit on top of open source code. If device products and software development would be free as in beer and as in speech nobody would be here discussing.

If it would be a "community supported open source OS" discussion then 'MeeGo community support' would be enough but for what I'm reading that is not the case for everybody.

Setting pure OSS expectations on Maemo/N900 ignoring the business aspects Nokia has to deal with (e.g. giving away interesting information to competitors) is probably not a good business.