I've owned my iPaq 2215 for so long that even when I owned an iPhone 3G last year it was still being used. Before the iPhone I was using an imate Pocket PC (the Himalaya... the smartphone that started HTC just google it).
The imate was big, heavy, drained battery but man was that OS so flexible and bursted with features. If maemo was as well distributed and incubated as long as Windows Mobile (2003SE - 6.5) did, it would definently blow it out of the water. But I'm just stating what I know and think is factual, that is, WM6 is "currently" slightly more advanced than Maemo.
A detailed comparison between the two is just out of my power, so take it as you please (a grain of salt, or a viagra pill) choice is yours my friend.
On another note, lets say I had the option of choosing WM6 or Maemo5, I would choose Maemo5 because of the "potential" it has for me in the future; WM6 development is officially dead with WP7 release whereas Maemo5 still has some time before it's funeral!
If by advanced you mean "halts the CPU completely whenever in standby so its next to useless as you can't run background tasks" and "strips a ton of functions out of .NET framework in the mobile version compared to desktop" then yes, Windows Mobile IS more advanced. But those are pretty huge disadvantages and EXACTLY why I switched from Windows Mobile to Maemo, as a modern high-end smartphone should not have such restrictions.
I loved Visual Studio, I think its an awesome development environment as it makes everything so easy, but I kept stumbling on stupid limitations imposed on the mobile APIs so I always hit a brick wall. Maemo however you have real portability, it has the SAME API as the desktop not a watered down version, so if you want to do something its easy to write it on desktop and know it will behave more or less the same on the N900.
Fact is, Maemo is Linux, its biggest restriction is battery life due to the simple fact you CAN use it exactly like desktop Linux. I prefer an OS that lets me do anything vs one that strips functionality I need "to save battery life" any day. Quite frankly, Windows Mobile was hugely limiting for me.
I really do not see however you look at it that you can call Windows Mobile more advanced an OS. Being able to send MMS out of the box is not an OS feature, its an application. The OS is the bare-bones, what the kernel can do and what you can make an application do on top of that OS without hacking. In that sense Maemo kicks everything out of the water, period.
anyways, nokia just confirmed that there will be no dualbooting because they are busy ensuring what is best for the n900. wow what a joke.
ensuring whats best for a autistic child with no life support who became infertile coz you kicked it in the balls.
"infertile? its not my fault! it was infertile long before i kicked it in the nuts! if only it had microsoft windows phone 7..."
bravo nokia.. bravo..
