As far as I can tell, no Nokia will ever sell well in the US, unless they remove the Nokia USA battery, wait for 10 months, upload a fastboot organization mod, then makes a hard reboot.
btw. we won't get any Nokia "N950" for the MeeGo Coding Competition (check my signature) but all participants are encouraged to apply for such a device with their project.
You must have forgotten that half the procedures describing how to upgrade/fix problems with the N900 as well as a lot of other phones, come with the line
3) Remove the battery.
Personally I've had to remove the battery on my phone at least ten times the last week. I worry. Holding the power button for 8/10 seconds is fine when it works, but not so fine when it doesn't work.
Furthermore, the inability to replace a worn out battery or to switch batteries on a GPS-intensive hike is a REALLY bad step backwards, and nobody but marketing people would ever defend that way to go. Not even product designers.
This product is a step back in several ways. There's no way around that.
On the many devices i have owned that don't have removable battery like Zune HD, ipad2, ipod and iphone i have had zero problems with the button combinations. Worked example when jailbroke went wrong.
Though i agree not being able to change to full battery or replace battery gone wrong without paying or needing to go for the trouble.
I was told that the decision to not release the (now named N950) developer device was becasue of the sliding mechanism.
I don't know if this is true or not and to be clear: I doubt it. Nokia made a wonderful sliding mechanism in the Nokia E7 and the one at the dev device I had to play with felt nearly the same.
What remains then as reason?
Management (read: Elop) or anything else?
I remember reading that E7 was delayed because it had flaws in the slider that were noticed late when manufacturing was about to start. So it would make sense that N950 with similar mechanism would have been delayed for the same reason. But why it was cancelled instead of just delayed? That must be due to some bizarre business calculation.
