RPM based? For the love of Baud why? apt-get/aptitude and deb packages is so much cleaner. I spent years fighting with rpm based Red Hat and Mandriva. Please, don't make me go back to that hell.

Dropping the Debian parent distribution is bad enough but going to rpm packaging? Boooo...

I've been watching N900 prices since it finally hit store shelves but this latest news is seriously shattering my desire to drop 500+ on an N810 replacement. It smells too much like continuing to buy Palm devices beyond the T5 while the parent company runs the hardware and OS into the ground.

Will the N900 continue to get platform updates after Maemo5 or am I going to be buying a device just as third party development abandons the platform? (eg. no Maemo4 app updates now that Maemo5 is in full swing)

And what are the alternatives, a mobile platform that criminalize the device owner just by making it usable, a mobile platform that delivers a creepy harvesting of personal information, Windows7 phone edition.. I'm having serious flashbacks to Palm's abandoning software development then delivering a string of crap treo hardware rather than evolving the T5 hardware.

(Now I'll get down off my soap box and go find the applicable thread for OS and hardware specific platform.)

For now, I'll wait, and watch.. and see if the N900 reaches a reasonable price point while retaining a platform development path. Here's hoping Nokia doesn't Newton there tablet devices (The other PDA options out there suck right now).