So, you bought the N900, what’s next? With news about MeeGo devices being announced soon, the obvious question remains: Will the N900 get MeeGo? Or will I need to buy a new handset to enjoy MeeGo? Here are are reasons why we think it the N900 might get the full MeeGo treatment.
1 Valtteri Halla, MeeGo Technical Steering Group at Nokia said: “N900 is a natural tool for Nokia to drive MeeGo support or our designs and for the ARM CPU architecture in general.” He also went on to say that:
We want to have baseline HW that is powerful, easily available for anyone and form-factor stuff so that one HW works for most platform and application development needs.
That said, please do not take this yet as a commitment to fully productise MeeGo on N900. I am quite confident that we will end up having a really good developer distro for N900 already but committing to stabilise a consumer-grade MeeGo 1.0 (first half this year) for N900 is another story. That is a product business decision beyond my scope. Also, we do not yet know about MeeGo 1 release content. I am not yet sure if I would be personally ready to let my Maemo5 go for the first MeeGo release in my daily N900 use. Let’s see.”
2.Ray Haddow, Senior Manager within Nokia Communications said that the: “the door is not closed”.
3.Quim Gil, Marketing Manager, Open Source at Nokia: “Yes, MeeGo will take the N900 as first ARM reference hardware. So yes, there will be MeeGo support for the N900 since day 1.” (Source)
4.Different than Symbian, Nokia Internet Tablets have been know to get updates to the next major OS release. Take for example the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, which was released with Maemo OS2007. Later it got not one, but two updates: Maemo OS2008(Chinook) and OS2008 Feature Upgrade (Diablo).
5.Nokia N900 is running early version of MeeGo just fine. Even better is that anyone can download the image and install the VERY early build and the repositories are up.
As you can see from the above, the N900’s hardware is more than capable of running MeeGo and is even serving as the baseline hardware, this means that technically there is no reason why it could not get full MeeGo support. But there are no guarantees here, as Nokia is not committing to the project and might, due to a business, not technical reason, still decide not to give the N900 official MeeGo support.
What do you think, is the N900 getting official MeeGo support from Nokia?
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I think Nokia will only have to decide if they want to extend the support customer care wise to the “N900 MeeGo” as well as the official MeeGo device. At the same time they might not want to invest time and resources into finalizing MeeGo for a device they can no longer get money for. I mean I think only enthusiasts will update to MeeGo, but they’ll do it even if MeeGo for N900 is not official.
It will only help Nokia sell new MeeGo devices if they show support for the N900. If not then there is no reason to believe that Nokia will shut doors on MeeGo as well when the next platform arrives (thinking way ahead of myself?). Business decision is one thing, being competitive is another. Lets look at Apple, they provide updates to almost all their devices under 2 years, 3G getting iOS4 etc and N900 is not even 1 year old!!! It’s time Nokia wakes up to stand behind their Customers or forever snooze.
we all are waiting for meego
I believe N900 might get Meego support, but not until there have been a few Meego phones out in the market….I mean Nokia wouldnt try to harm the sales of N9 and the following devices by releasing Meego in N900 before these are even released.
Nokia want N9 to sell as much as possible, being its flagship device to take heads on with iPhone and Android. Releasing Meego on N900 before N9 is even launched would greatly damage the attention N9 is getting. N900 is not puny in any sense with respect to features, but a bigger capacitive screen and multi-touch, with better camera and some minor hardware upgrades is what needed to counter iPhone and Androids. And nokia has all its hopes on N9.
This comes from a N900 user though, and I wish that my N900 gets an official Meego release (and not a developers one) asap.