What are your three key steps to a winning n900 succesor... lets call it the Nokia Magnum in the current age of the iphone 4, HTC Evo and Dell Streak?

The succesor of n900 needs to adopt a sleek 4.3-4.5" hd2 style slider for starters with high DPI. With some of the purported features of the HD3 -stage 1 (its a 12.9mm toshiba K01 in the slider pic)



It needs to be self sufficient running a windowed OS as a UMPC e.g easy debian runnings apps fast but most others too with basic USB host etc features like my Viliv S5 - stage 2.

Meego needs to have a usable phone OS with a decent appstore - stage 3 or just substitute with a ready made phone OS e.g Android or Symbian v5 for apps

The iphone has the slogan "there's an app for that" how about for the n900 successor "theres an OS for that"!

Current suggestions on thread:
*Make it easier for programmers to develop apps - naabi
*Focus on its niche features to a niche market (sort of agree with this) - ysss
*Backward compatibility with Maemo - McGrim
*Make it cheap like the old tablets - mikec

What do you think?

1) Get the spec sheet feature list of the n8 and jot down everything right down to the usb host and digital compass (more memory and better processor always appreciated). If Qt is to work, imo, there's got to be parity between the flagship Symbian and MeeGo device.

2) Add a FOUR row qwerty keyboard

3) Install Android on it. Alright.. I guess MeeGo will have to do

Be better in all possible aspects, that'd do it

Get that n8 camera or anything better for strters. Flash 10.1 is needed too

IMHO the objective is not to defeat the rivals. You'll end up being followers to other platforms all the time. You can't out-apple/google/rim apple/google/rimm.

They need to identify their core audience and think of what makes their customers happy. This way they'll continue the word of mouth marketing, and will be repeat customers when the time comes.

At *any* cost, the rival must have the same task-switcher with maemo. It's probably the most eye-catching feature of N900 and the one thing that distinguishes it from the first moment.

Contacts and messaging integration and plugin system is most probably the second best thing.

Linux has the ability to be somewhat of a dual-usage system: either go geek and use the raw power it posesses, or cover it up under some scripts/software and make it 'just work'.
One thing they should do is not break backwards compatibility with previous maemos. This would make the old (tried&true) apps work with minimal porting, and reduce some of the gap in apps.
Another useful idea would be to create a mechanism to allow normal users to easily get help from more experienced ones. What i mean: instead of being told "go to terminal, do sudo gainroot etc", the user could be given a script (made ad-hoc by community members) to diagnose/fix the problem. It is possible now to create ad-hoc .deb's, but that's complicated. People paid to give this kind of support would be something innovative and imho a great advantage.

For starters, the N900 successor could defeat its rivals if the already established N900 owners just shut the hell up with the complaints in this forum and actually contributed directly to Nokia. Public complaints just give a bad image for a company you prefer.

App support to Nokia would have been a way to go as well, couple years ago at least. N-Gage was a failure and guess what the reason was? You cry for OVI Store and games, and when you actually had a working online store and service, you never bought a damn game.

Digital-era slavery FTW.

Blindly and fanatically channel all your funds to them, no matter their offering?
Believe it or not, there are a few elements that need to be present to make a healthy and active market works. Not just willing buyers.

for me, n900 beats other smartphones. coz there are many things i can do on the n900 that i cant on other phones, like running 10+ apps at a time. (even those snapdragon powered processor phones)