Hi all,

It seems round here that the general consensus is that Nokia are taking a long time to release PR1.1.

I'm keen to understand the underlying reason behind this, whether it is a large update that warrants alot of testing, or if it is just by virtue of Nokia's release processes / development cycles.

The reason I'm keen to understand is because I see this currently as being the weakest aspect of the Maemo platform on the n900, I think that if it gains a reputation for being "buggy", "for geeks" and these problems continue for a long period of time that an opportunity will be lost to accrue momentum during the early days of the n900.

What are your thoughts?

Cheers

the device as been out less than 2 months and got a minor update today and major update will follow shortly.
i don't understand what ppl are complaining about
is everyone just born without patience these days

I agree.

The firmware update today just proved that - build date is over two weeks (might be actualy WW44 but it has been said that actual compilation is WW52 or so).

Updated and fixed should be immediately released, as this is not only customers interest but nokia's as well.

rapid updates are not a luxury but a must.

as seen today, this is only madness and really minor update makes the place go wild and all scrutinies are all forgotten and nokia is praised a bit like junkies and daily fixes...

you're on your own then with untested fast updates, should you join nokias testing ring?

Well I think the problem at hand is that the information of the update was released about a month ago. And they told that there would be an update before christmas. Next big thing was that they named the update with 51, therefore implying that the update has been ready for several weeks. So to think about it, a lot of people here have been waiting for it over a month or so.

On the other hand. "Normal people" are starting to get the phone delivered and might not watch every hour if the firmware is released. They might have used the phone for a week or two. It's still a relatively new product and if you think that the phone was officially released for sale in the beginning of december I think flaming about the update taking too long is a bit early.

I would love to have Nokia unsupported beta repo with FW updates just like all major nix distributions have unstable/current, but I understand it will cause a hell for support guys.

who told and what? aliens? sources please or it doesn't exist.

and release fw is 42-11 that implies to week 42. device was released @week 48. so 6 weeks old firmware? (answer:no, you're just speculating)

I guess this update is based on problems on the upgrade reported from testers of the new firmware, and a big widescala test before the real new firmware is released.

I'm not complaining so much as trying to understand the processes involved.

IMO, the bug identified => identified fix => release process is not as quick as the equivalent process on debian / ubuntu. Arguably the fact that the phone has only been out 2 months means that this update process should be quicker than at a later stage in the product's lifespan, to capitalise on initial interest in the n900 / not give everyone a bad initial impression of things to come.

I would agree with the idea of allowing for a beta repo; whilst I can understand that Nokia may want to protect users from shafting their handset, this process works well for all other Linux distros without too much of this problem, as well as MS with Win 7 betas etc. If they can do it, why can't Nokia?