In order to "win" over its rivals, Nokia should have stayed the course and continued making ever-better tablets instead of trying to become yet-another-iPhone rival. Upgradeable and open, hackable hardware would have made them the overlords of their own kind of devices. As it is, this race with Apple and Android is making Nokia much less creative and weaker at the same time.

only way for it to be successful is if nokia fully support it, and constantly put money in to it. apps apps apps.

Can we please move away from this pubertal "defeat" term. These are not the 90s. The technosphere these days is multicentric, and this is a good thing.

Thread title: Q: How can the n900 succesor defeat its rivals?

A: It should be exactly like the N900, with a keyboard, maybe multitouch, resistive screen to be able to use a stylus for drawing and what not, more apps and most importantly these features.

I agree, in so far as support means customer service (parts, accessories, etc.), communications (reps you can meet face to face would be HUGE) and OPEN SOURCE (provide more details for hardware hackers too--not just software openness, which is lacking in critical places as it is). I'm really not even sure that putting money into it is even so much the issue--I'm pretty sure the community would volunteer more effort to support it (apps apps apps). If Nokia bothered to be at least as Linuxy and open-source friendly as they insist they are (read my previous posting) and stop trying to play this smart-phone "me-too" game with iPhone and Android, they would be the biggest game in a different market than smart phones and allow their Symbian side to put more effort into the smartphone efforts.

How is the n900/maemo/meego not on track?
Linux always has been the underdog in the os.

I don't have the numbers but I bet it would just about pan out that linux has roughly the same share of the smart phone market as it does desktops. The difference here is that MS and Apple switch shares. This of course excludes Android, cause I have no clue how to fit them in the scenario. I don't count them as a true linux os. Maybe they can be all the BeOS and Amigas, yet I still think that would discount their numbers.

Anyway, I'm guessing the adoption rate on linux phones is similar to desktops, so once you figure out how to magically increase the acceptance of the desktop linux maybe it will follow suite for phones.

get rid of lag and it will be a hero

Here's my chance to piss off the entire forum...

After reading this thread... thank goodness Nokia doesn't listen to the average TMO member about what they should do next. You guys can't even get along when you're on the same side and if that meant a "design by committee" device, it would ultimately be as confusing and a UI/UX/ergonomics nightmare.

To defeat anything, they need to be coherent and progressive. All good competitors are like that. And ultimately, I'm starting to doubt that Nokia can pull it off - being coherent, communicative and truly open.

I think the next device needs to be 'polished' (not in the literal sense). By this, I mean that there should be more attention to detail in terms of feature completeness and useability corner cases.

The next device should continue along the pocket computer theme. It should stay true to its heritage, and continue to fully support easy porting of upstream packages by not focusing too hard on QT and 'mobile apps'.

Finally, and I may be going out on a limb here, I think it could get a little bigger in order to provide a little more battery capacity, a slightly bigger screen, and the 4 row keyboard mentioned above. Oh yeah, proper, USB OTG, maybe with the old style charger socket in addition to the microUSB, so it could power external devices. And a compass.

That would do for me, I think.

The problem with linux is that it is hard to use. Most people don't care that you can do miracles. They only know about miracles you can do by pressing a button. Not miracles you can do bu using terminal and writing complicated scripts. This is why the iphone did so great. It is so simple to use that even idiots can use it.

The N900 is better than the iphone or android in my opinion. It can do more things. But how many people are able to do these things? Only if you have a fair bit of linux background are you able to do such things.

So the next device in my opinion should be compatible with idiots to succeed. So simple that even a kid could use most of its functions.