And which exactly feature you were using was not well implemented?

Lets take a simple example - did you ever watch video on your n900? If you have any clue what I am asking - how was it encoded?

Lets put in in this way - find and download some xvid on the web and try to play it on you WP phone. Then return here and tell me what the result was, OK?

Way I see this there were two possibles that lead to this.

Elop came in with this in mind from the start and the board hired him to do just this.

Elop came in looked at where the programmers were with Symbian and Meego and realized it was in worse shape than anyone knows with no hope of getting better anytime soon and decided the only hope to save Nokia was to take this big punt.

I think there are may other paths he could have taken to right the ship including building a WP7 and Andriod phone to gain some market share and get back into the US, while continuing to try and develop the Symbion and Meego platform to come up with the Halo phone they need.

As I see it now Nokia are just an also ran that will never be a major player again.

??? even if you were right about features not being well implemented - which you aren't: if you need a certain feature, wich is better? not having it at all? or having it in a working state, but with some rough edges?

I would rather leaving features out and properly implementing core features. This seems trivial but using WP7 I can open an SMS instantly. I personally loved sometimes waiting a good fifteen+ seconds for a message to open on my N900.

Regardless have you even used WP7? It was a good choice on Nokia's part for the sake of the companies existence. MeeGo was developing too slowly and the company needed to respond to change.

you could have had all of this beautiful simplicity for a quarter of the price on an average S40 model. welcome to the joys of cheap feature phones. i honestly think you'll enjoy it and never look back, because you don't expect much of a phone. you don't need the full PC-experience in the palm of your hands.
(15 seconds for a text message to open? never on an n900, except you did... you know... "things".)

Sorry for interrupting your conversation but since you're using WP7 you could help me in this one. Have you been successfully installed any unsigned CAB that used to work in WM?

Nokia as a company will hardly be 100% behind Windows Phone.
At least the work force will be torn apart, maybe half-hearted effort.

For every 'your father', there are at least five others that will look what features/possibilities their next device offers them and/or ask for an advice from people not in the fanbase, but in the 'knowbase'.

Easily, Nokia sold more than 100 devices in the past 10 years just based on my advice to my family/friends/coworkers (three of those being N900). I could not, in my right mind, honestly recommend WP7 to anyone - it's a glorified feature phone platform, and for people that only need a feature phone there are far better and/or far cheaper options - for those that want flashy and trendy platform, and have money to waste, I'd recommend the iPhone; for those who only need to call/SMS from their device there are good sub $100 options, and what's more - usually not coming from Nokia.

He won't be able to try that - the Zune SW will not let him upload it to 'his' device (one would debate whether you own such a device or you are just leasing it from the manufacturer), anyway.

So that's the only thing you can name in favor of WP7? Good, let me find my old, trusty 3310 - it was also able to open everything in an instance... Of course, that 'everything' was mostly nothing, but it could open it in a blink of an eye.

Yes I did. One of my friends work at a local Microsoft branch and all the employees got them for Christmas even tho they won't be doing any mobile development - I guess Microsoft cares about the numbers of 'sold' items. And, I kid you not, in the middle of me playing with it, I was reading some blog on the intertubes (at least they've got the browser, finally, to usable-ish state) and there was an extremely good, albeit lengthy quote I wanted to forward to couple of my friends - beep, can't do it! The exact same thing I'm used to do, and consider it granted, since cca. 2002. I won't even mention the lack of multitasking, many people do not understand the importance of it anyway.

But ok, I was aware of that limitation - what truly came as a nasty surprise (at that time I really haven't read much on WP7 so I didn't have the idea how limited it really is) is when I wanted to transfer some my music library from my N900 (or my laptop) to it so we can test how well it does BT streaming to my car's infotainment system. Since I often lend him my car, he considered that a crucial feature that had to be thoroughly tested. No BT file transfers, ok I can live with that, but I couldn't even transfer it via cable from my laptop because, oh I don't know, I need a special software to do that which, surprise surprise, does not exist for Linux. Being stubborn as I am, I tried to do it through Win7 installation in VBox, but to no avail - it wouldn't even recognize the damn device. So we tried to pair his device with my car anyway and at least get it to play what he already transferred to it, and there comes another cold shower - my car didn't recognize it not as a phone device, and not as a multimedia device! At that point even my friend, who is a strong supporter of Microsoft way of thinking which from time to time stirs fierce debates, called it a POS because, I don't know, his three years old Nokia s40 device (can't remember the exact mark) could do all those things without breaking a sweat.

On an off note, I think that the UI is actually more horrid than the one on the iPhone, but that's, I guess, a matter of personal preference so I wouldn't hold that against it.

5x, you sure? When looking around on less-techincal forums, comments like "Looks hot! I gets oneoneone11!" are awfully common.

Since Elop came to Nokia still being a huge M$ stockholder, #1 is far more likely. Clearly MeeGo/Qt was moving too slowly, but that should've called for a better effort, not giving up. Symbian/MeeGo/Qt was a solid plan for long-term success. Of course they were scared to death of it! And remember, to M$ Linux will always be nothing but a disease that needs to be exterminated.

With this deal in one clean sweep M$ has accomplished several goals critically important to them:

1. Taken a major Linux (MeeGo) supporter and their resources out of the game.
2. Convinced Nokia to eliminate another rival OS, Symbian. That's 2 rival OS out, WP7 in. What a deal!
3. Considerably weakened Qt, another competitive technology.
4. Picked up at least several million WP7 customers.
5. Made Bing the default Nokia search engine, strengthening their position against Google search.
6. Picked up millions of customers for M$ gaming.

And on and on... An unbelievable deal for M$, and one they would've done whatever it took to make happen. Monkey Boy Ballmer and Elop, the huge M$ stockholder, win bigtime. Ballmer and Elop dance, awkwardly. Nokia gets...a totally closed, unfinished crap OS and a dim future. Their employees bend over and grimace.

Elop and the Nokia board should be put back ON that burning platform to roast. Nokia employees should do an Egypt kinda action.