I would hardly call MfE exchange "working". If you're only going to support Exchange 2007, that's fine, but then you damn well better lay that out from the onset. There are people (myself and MANY others) who expected this to work with Exchange 2003 and were completely screwed by Nokia's lying by omission. It's a lot harder to market a new device and a new OS if you tell people the truth about what it can and can't do. They were banking on pre-release hype.

Legal issues will be restricted to a small subset of packages that are neither Free nor Nokia controlled (e.g. Flash). I'm fine with the idea that those packages may have slower release schedules than others, but that's no reason to delay updates to things not affected by such legal issues. So, not a reason to avoid rolling updates completely.

Process and management issues also shouldn't be a problem since they're entirely internal to Nokia, and also well understood. The other distributions that manage this seemingly staggering feat already have process and management systems that work. In the case of the community distros like Debian and Fedora, and to a lesser extend with things like RHEL, those processes are open and documented.

Rolling updates is a solved problem, both in technical and management terms, and in more complicated cases then this one. All that is required on Nokia's part is the will to do it properly, and the ability to lift the know-how from the people that have it; not least their own staff, plenty of whom clearly get this stuff perfectly well already.

This is a very blanket statement:

Maemo (community and department) may be willing to be agile enough for rolling updates to happen, but is the greater governance of Nokia willing, or even able to be just as agile? And even if the greater of Nokia was willing, can they escape the legacy issues that have determined its successes (profits, market and mindshare) to get to this point - or does the very company have to die and be resurrected?

hey, maybe off-topic... http://dailymobile.se/ take a look about what is said for the n900 update

i can't wait for that f****** update lol

Nokia had better release an update soon, otherwise the N900 is going to be overshadowed by more powerful devices which actually have stable software (the Nexus One, for instance, if becomes available Q1 of 2010).

I've wanted to buy an N900 since August 2009, but have waited due to the large number of bugs which I consider to be unacceptable. I design hardware for a living and I've been using Linux for 15 years, but I won't have my phone misbehaving on me. I feel like I have to deal with enough software bugs already, so I'd rather have an underfeatured Symbian or Android phone than a beta Linux phone.

I just hope this'll be the one to fix the Three sim card issue.

I think it is much simpler, in that the staff responsible for Maemo 5 updates and rolling them to the N900 is probably a small team compared to an OS like Android.

Android was pretty methodical and consistent with releases, in order to not damage perception of user experience. They could afford to since the team is fairly large and they have a very strong relationship in their dev community and more resources supporting them.

I think if the Nokia Maemo team hand similar resources, we would see steady updates- as needed. JMO.

I would expect two releases in Q1:

Release 1. Fix current bugs
Release 2. Portrait and MMS (to name a few).

I like Nokia for a lot of reasons but they are quite laid back and not very serious. They promised Kinetic scrolling support for 5800XM a while back but no show yet. Dont expect much from them as they are out of their depth these days.

Nokia is a big company and trying to extrapolate information by treating it like a single entity isn't particularly useful. Don't confuse the Symbian and Maemo teams