Ha! You must not work for a large corporate beast, then... The support/freedom that Nokia allows the maemo team is simply unparalleled!
Tim
You're right, in that half-arsed, two-steps-forward-one-step-back support is better than completely ignoring a community even exists.
But that by no means implies there should be rejoycing, dancing in the streets and offerings of first-borns to the kind and benevolent gods of N'Ohkyaah.
1/ Upgrade the OS without needing a software re-install afterwards.
Not easy to do, given that the OS can't know the dependencies of postinstalled software, unless they prohibit third-party software. Windows, OSX and Linux distros merely replacing the OS underneath the existing software either fail miserably on it or grow huge amounts of backward-compatibility layering. Sorting out that kind of thing in a clean way means recursively backtracking the full tree and refreshing every affected bit of it, and may take up many gigs of disk space and update durations in the order of days (ok, Gentoo as the prime example of a live upgrading distro is further hampered by doing everything by way of recompiles, but even binary Gentoo meta packages are sloow at upgrading).
The current way of saving the state and reinstalling is not that bad - but of course it causes friction in the case of major upgrades, where many to-be-reinstalled packages aren't there yet.
2/ Install/embed Calendar/ Contact/ To Do software with similar capabilities to the Palm - especially to run the same software suite on Windows/ Mac/ Linux for simple sync.
Nice to have, but I have my doubts that anybody will succeed at someting where Palm ultimately failed - the whole conduit/sync thing got more and more vulnerable as the Palms grew more complex.
3/ Ditto a port of Thunderbird to sync with PC/ Mac/ Linux.
Mail client database syncing was the worst invention ever, it is in utter ignorance of what servers are supposed to be good for. And Thunderbird is hardly the mail app of choice for a small screen/memory device - even Claws, which needs much less screen estate, is already somewhat hard to use on the IT.
It looks like Nokia is headed in the right direction with the new IM and SIP integration. I would be curious to know if they have any plans to add integration with social networks like Facebook or MySpace.
Mail client database syncing was the worst invention ever, it is in utter ignorance of what servers are supposed to be good for.
I was asking for syncing of email databases of my choice. Why would that be the worst invention ever? That makes me ignorant?
I take your point about the OS upgrade, I just hope that there don't have to be critical upgrades very often.
With the Palm conduits, I've used the Palm TX and previous models for years with no sync problems whatsoever. This with office apps, and all kinds of 3rd party software as well. I can accept that Nokia don't want to do it or don't know how to do it. I don't accept that people don't want it.
I took into account that the Nokia was for techies when I bought it and it does enough things well and easily for me to not be unhappy about that. But as a small computer, it's capable of many things. I just happen to think that it would be nicer if the addition of a simple PIM suite with simple syncing was easier for a customer to accomplish.
Most modern OS's allow upgrades without forcing reinstallation of existing applications; it's called patching. Windows, Solaris, Linux, MacOS; all allow upgrades to the OS without a forced reinstall of all applications and their data.
"Palm ultimately failed - the whole conduit/sync thing got more and more vulnerable as the Palms grew more complex."
Obviously you haven't used a Palm. The sync works great. It allows you to change things on your desktop and then sync them to the Palm, and vice versa - very very convenient, and useful. You have no idea how much easier it is to use a Palm than an N800 for PIM tasks.
Happy New Years Dan, and welcome back. I'd like to see you pry info out of them about stage 4 and stage 5. My wallet is itching and it looks like I might figure out how to get an N810 shipped to my subarctic Canadian lumber village. (We're just a city of 3 million with a metro LAN, we're not a viable market anyway.) But yeah, I'd like to know where they're going with all of this.
Though they didn't affect me one bit (aside from it taking 6 hours to DL OS2007HE), I'd like to know if they have plans to get maemo.org and the repositories up to snuff.
Dan, I'm almost sure you have already thought about this but, in case you forget, please ask about: Possible google software integration (maybe even native?)
PS: BTW you are the reason why I'm a total and happy tableteer since November... thanks!!
Maybe ask them at what point there will be enough Mac users to warrant installers for them? Looking around for third party and command-line stuff isn't really a good answer for us 'less technically inclined' types.
But yeah, I'd like to know where they're going with all of this.