Comment by rektide

I wish I could speak more to the experience directly. I eventually got a n900 used but after the fall, & I was a college kid with no real need for it. What was thrilling & exciting & totally different was that the n900 was a computer. A regular computer. Trying to learn how to make GNOME an ok experience, on very low res mobile. But we knew essentially what it was; it obeyed & played within the regularinux desktop environment world. it was a linux desktop environment, and that gave it open potential. Everything is/was orchestrateable/controllable by dbus, the user's control plane. All the apps exposed themselves over IPC. It played in the connected desktop world as best of breed.

The failure of this situation to talk about how intensely stupid it was to give up on the platform is farcically bad. What was here was incredible. It needed improvement & work but the architecture was immensely omni-potential, more capable clearly & growing well known existing tech well, rather than alternate reality symbian or then counter respondes danger or android. weird new alternates to actual linux desktop. Selling out to MS was one of the most shortsighted sorry pathetic givings ups, in a time of vast growth with fantastically little belief in yourself & your people doing good. There was no technical reason to refocus. (But bad numbers, as most players saw). They should have kept going. This was a decision made by people who had faint sense, gailed to appreciate hope, missed clarity on what creating value was like, what value was. This was a pathetic ignorant stupid business decision, to end Maemo. Things rocked, that was a great could do possibility, the OLE COM competitor kf DBus was winning, the market just didnt see yet.