Over 5 millions downloads as of today - and some people say that Maemo is not popular!

I have seen Peters tweet and am shocked at the really low number. Most people on Talk Maemo have surely downloaded in excess of 30 aps. It seems Nokia did not even sell 1 mio N900 or the number of downloads would be far higher.

You seem to be rather disollusioned about some numbers here. If Nokia sold anything like a million of these internet tablets in 4-5 months i'd eat my house, this isn't a mass marked device so why would you expect sales to be enormous? The Nexus One has been on sale since christmas, and sales for that have only slightly nudged about 100,000 - It took the Droid 2 and a half months to make a million sales, and that was a massively hyped mass-market device intended for everyone. The N900 is a niche internet tablet with a phone built into it, and you expect record-busting mass-market sales numbers?
Also note: t.m.o only has 35,000 users - if each and every single one of those owns an n900 and downloads 30 apps, you're still only at 1 million downloads.

According to some sources Nokia's management gave only resources to produce 100.000 units of N900 per month.

"T-Mobile USA is currently the fourth-largest wireless carrier in the U.S. market with 33.4 million customers"

and yes I was expecting the N900 to sell about a million devices in half a year considering it is sold in more than 20 countries and is heavily marketed towards end users at least in the UK.

*edit* nexus one is only sold online and as far as I know was until very recent ONLY sold in USA and perhaps UK

That surprised me indeed. When I was at LHR airport 6 weeks ago there where big billboards showing the N900. In the months before I saw nothing about the N900 in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malasia, Thailand and The Netherlands.

And it still seems to be not marketed at all here in The Netherlands

This is a story I hear quite often... usually like: "They had planned to produce 30.000 a month but had to do 100.000/month because of the high demand, which they hadn't expected."

I find myself telling this story to other people, still I never found a real source for it. Are we creating our own forum-myth here or is there any source for these figures?

t.m.o = talk.maemo.org, not t-mobile

first time i read this

was in January. Surely if the N900 would be really successful they would have the possibility to produce more.

Amazon.de and amazon.com have the N900 in stock but what surprised me was that thecarphonewarehouse.com (one of the big phone retailers in Britain) does not heavily advertises it on its site anymore like the did in January

the n900 is not heavily advertised in UK, a few posters on london tube and at Heathrow is hardly a campaign.
in the rest of the UK theres been zero real world advertising