Nokia were already giving us as much as they could justify from a cost-benefit analysis; I'm sure, corporately, the view of the benefits will be lower. However, it won't do any harm to ask again - although let's perhaps let our friends in MeeGo DevicesComputers catch their breath and work out if they've still got a job. Or want one.
I hadn't realised at the time that the N900 might be a "Concorde moment". After the shock of the MeeGo announcement it was clear that it represented Nokia's new direction: an open, Linux-based, strategic vision, with a commitment to cross-platform and developer-friendly tooling. A range of devices from Nokia and other manufact urers. The Harmattan device would be the first: a flashier UI, smaller, faster, longer-lived battery-toting version of the N900. That's all I want: a smaller, lighter, faster version of the N900 running an evolution of Maemo 5 (primarily with some bugs fixed and more apps) which I could rely on all day..
Nokia are now not going to deliver that entirely. It's possible the MeeGo device released "this year" might be interesting in the same way that the 770 was. But unlike the promise of the 770, I suspect it'll be stillborn. But there is a benefit to this that I can see. With no clear successor for the N900, some people will keep theirs for a bit longer, others - who may have been waiting for the Harmattan device - may now buy one. This means the Community SSU can have more users, more developers and more polish. Already we've seen patches which fix hildon-desktop's CPU eating bug; make Modest work better offline; make Modest more conformant to standards; an improved TV-out control panel plugin; an improved notification LED control panel plugin and so on. Many of these also widen the system's support of portrait usage. We also already have improved development tools with the Qt SDK. Although there may not be a compelling new device, we have a reinvigorated platform. Maybe that's enough.