What to do about that Diablo promise? Re-label the next minor release Diablo and move on ...
Interesting idea, if entirely unsubstantiated :-)
Like GeneralAntilles, I was under the impression that Chinook would be the codename for maemo 4.x, which meant Diablo would be 5.x and Elephanta 6.x.
If Diablo is 4.1 after all, it seems odd to have a codename for a minor release; but if it's a major release, why not bump the major version number? If it's just OS2008 + WiMAX support, 4.1 makes sense (but not, necessarily the Diablo name). That'd make OS2009/maemo 5.0 == Elephanta.
Aha! They want to make Elephanta maemo 5.0 so that the initial letter corresponds to its position in the (English) alphabet. That'd make maemo 6.0 one of Foehn or Freemantle. What they do when they get back to "G" and can't use "Gregale", I've no idea :-)
Doubtful that Nokia will stick with the current hardware/CPU, I guess. With MIDs being the hot thing these days, Nokia may need to up the ante and start defending a segment that they have created.
Then Intel really starts to move on its low power SoC devices and it looks like Nokia are going to have to switch processors soon and that is going to seriously fork the code.
It doesn't look like anything of the sort. Sure, Intel is pushing the lower-power x86, but they're still nowhere near the efficiency of the ARM stuff. It'll be at least another year before they can match it (probably more), and you can be certain that TI isn't gonna be sitting on their hands with the OMAP stuff while Intel is trying to catch up.
Besides, Nokia has a huge investment in ARM and OMAP, and a very strong relationship with TI (as I've mentioned in other threads). They get huge volume discounts on the OMAP stuff with because of their phones, and they know the OMAP. These are not things you throw away lightly for what amounts to a less efficient, and more expensive processor lineup targeted at larger and more expensive devices (the MIDs are somewhere between the NITs and the UMPCs) that you don't really have any experience with.
What to do about that Diablo promise? Re-label the next minor release Diablo and move on ...
Look at the reaction of 770 owners to the OS2007 issue, there's no way they would do this again with N800/N810 owners, especially not after promising them support through what pretty much everybody understood to be OS2009.
Promises aside, they can't possibly expect to get away with only a single major revision for the N810. Something like that could effectively kill the platform. . . .
