You make a lot of sense for a demented lemur.

What is it with Scandinavian firms and their penchant to drop support for almost new products? Sony Ericsson recently announced they were dropping support for the P990, M600 and W950i phones (the latter launched only in November 2006 - less than 9 months ago!)

All sounds earily familiar doesn't it?

After a big outcry, SE have now backtracked, promised one further update (only one, which isn't going down too well with the natives) and even a release date - now there's something Nokia could learn from their Swedish neighbours, release dates don't have to be kept a secret!

wtf, if they can offer replacement for their faulty BL-5C battery, i dont see why they cant do a replacement for the design-flawed WSOD-ed 770. f*** nokia!

Remember this thread? Still waiting for Nokia's "vapor-support" for the N-770 and they may soon be "vapor-supporting" the N-800. I notice that the N-700 still has an active page on their web-site.

Too bad, the N-810 may be a good product but I need longer than 9 months for $479 + tax plus + new hardware (mini-SD, 3 year subscription to a GPS service, etc)

Speaking of the 3 year GPS subscription, how can Nokia expect anybody to buy into that when they don't even support their products (the N-770) for that long?

First of all, the IT product line is as follows: 770, N800, N810. There are no N-770s or N-700s. Just like the i-Pod, N-800s do not exist.

Nokia has already stated that support for the N800 will continue at least through the next two major OS revisions (Chinook and Diablo). The mistakes of the 770 aren't something they're likely to make again. If the N810 doesn't suit you, buy an N800. It's a lot cheaper and just as fast.

When I had problems with my 770 earlier this year, I got support from Nokia. So as a 770 owner, I feel they still support the device.

Why they should exchange it I dont know. What would you want in return?

you can always flash to OS2007HE, which will give you a few more options. There is also now a flash 9 upgrade that works for both os2006 and os2007he, so that's a plus.

the N810 is based on N800 architecture, so any future development for the n810 will work with the n800.

plus, because of open source development, you'll still see people tweaking on the 770 for some time still.

That's how Nokia should have handled this.

1) Announce that the 770 is no longer supported

2) Create a "Legacy Community Foundation" for the 770, and also future devices

3) Spend just a little cash designing a decent website for the new foundation, so that it has a good software repository, maybe a tutorials section, a forum etc.

4) Release all the source code, documentation, schematics etc to the community *


* I realise that some software packages are proprietary, such as Opera, but the operating system, kernel and associated files should be GPL. Remember that binary blob drivers can only be included if they're already-existing cross-platform code. Linus himself has said as much. I'm sure this must have already been investigated, but if Nokia is simply keeping back driver code that it doesn't want to release then it's contravening the GPL.

That part about GPL is for lawyers. I think binary modules are tolerated, that's why the 'tainted' flag is there in kernel.

As for practical issues I guess nothing major will happen from Nokia side as for opening stuff. Opening stuff means throwing lawyers (and perhaps also developers) at the (dead) code. This would cost money and other resources. No reason to do this from their perspective.

The main pain is the wifi driver and partly also dsme. Other stuff would be nice but is mostly just for purists (booloader, bme).

For free/liberated device we would need to move freely to different kernel versions (from current old 2.6.16) which currently breaks dsme in initfs and wi-fi driver.

dsme does brightness control, kicking watchdogs and proxying access to config partition. We know how to kick watchdogs and control brightness but access to config partition would need some reverse-engineering. There are various flags stored there like r&d mode, root device, WLAN MAC address,... but the exact format is unknown (well, at least to to me)

Let's hope the hacker edition project will not die and move 770 to chinook and more recent linux kernel (i.e. they will not open the code but hopefully recompile those parts for us for newer kernel versions).

To sum it up - somewhat free system (like KDE, GPE) is possible without any major limitation if we stay with old kernel and non-free initfs partition (which loads bt and wlan firmware and spawns bme and dsme)

Fortunately brightness control and display blanking inside dsme can be controlled via dsmetest command in initfs.