I would sooner pay that money into a fund to purchase a phone with software from a company that updates their phone regularly for free (Google). That way when new phone time comes around I can take the $600ish I was going to spend on a Nokia device and get something that will see some major updates in it's lifetime.

Never ever...nokia isnt getting any more of my money. Agree with some of you that a new feature can quantify for a payment[alike the apps] but not fixes.

Instead, I wld be happy to pay the dev community working for free and are supporting both Nokia and consumers like me.

Supposing, if we agree to pay for a firmware update, Nokia would certainly be releasing more and more half baked products into the market to exploit the additional earnings

Yeah, but the rest of the flash is slow and if they did that, you would be complaining about a sluggish phone on which you spent €600. So they can't win either way.

As for people who claim that this would encourage Nokia to bring half baked phones to the market, well you always have the option not to buy a phone if it is half baked, right? Here we have a slightly different situation where most of us have already bought the phone because we assumed that it would be supported for a long time and it would be the future etc. Since that assumption is not correct, do we keep crying about what essentially is a sunk cost (sorry, but all of us have already paid for the phone and its not going to change irrespective of whether Nokia support it in future or not) or do we work towards making the situation better?

This whole thing reminds me of my former boss. He held shares in a big bank which he had bought for £8 a piece and in its hay day, the shares were worth £11 or so. However, when the market start collapsing and the share price dropped to £6, he wouldn't sell his shares... the reason he gave was that he just couldn't bear to sell the shares he had bought for £8 at £6, even though all indications were that the prices would drop even further. At the end of it all, the share price dropped to £0.30 and he lost a whole lot of money, and the reason was that he was stuck on what he had paid for the shares initially, not what the market reality was. Fact is that humans hate to admit, even to themselves, that they may have made a mistake.

So in a rational world, whatever you paid for N900 should have nothing to do with what you would pay for it in future. What you probably should be comparing it to is the cost of getting an alternative which would do what you would like your phone to do and if implementing those features on N900 is cheaper, you go for that, else you buy the alternative. Alas, we don't live in a world where people act rationally

Its not this simple IMO.

Yes, I would pay a one-off fee to upgrade to MeeGo. No, I would not pay a regular fee just to upgrade to the next minor version.

Lets not forget though, Apple offer free upgrades to the iPhone and even the iPod get minor updates for free with only major OS releases being charged. I realise its comparing apples to oranges but if Nokia want to ever regain any brand loyalty they need to look at what the competition are doing, and do better. They have far too poor a reputation now to even just do the same as everyone else, they need to offer more.

At the moment I am on the fence about what I will get next. If Nokia are the only ones offering the features I want, then I will probably buy from them. However if is there is a comparable device by someone else, I think I would go with the someone else as I do not trust Nokia to support me through the lifetime of my device.

As I have said before, if the N900 continues to get updates over the next year then my faith in Nokia will be somewhat restored. However if they stop updating before my contract runs out, they will confirm my fears that they have no vision whatsoever and treat us like crap.

It doesn't matter if its a simple port between MeeGo and Maemo support now, chances are Maemo will still have bugs which prevent some apps from porting successfully so Nokia need to be willing to fix those bugs if they really want a competitive marketplace. Do we really think the Meego API is just going to be frozen from the get go? No, it will evolve and so those changes will need to be back-ported to Maemo for the software to remain compatible. That is not merely an end-user problem, I know if I were looking to write an application for Meego I would be thinking of sales and effort. A simple port to Maemo drastically increases potential sales, however if its complicated to port or a feature is missing that makes the port complex or impossible, I would think twice of bothering with Nokia at all.

You just have to look at Microsoft vs Sony in the console wars to see how much effort its taken for Sony to get people on board, because the Microsoft development kit is superb and makes Xbox/PC porting a breeze. Heck, I wrote a simple application for Windows Mobile in a very short time, yet I haven't even really gotten started on my N900 because its far too complicated. Microsoft holds your hand so as a beginner its easy, the N900 of course just uses open-source so very little hand holding at all and now I am stuck. But the N900 should not suffer from the drawbacks of open-source, that is the whole point of it being MOSTLY open-source. Nokia should be implementing the missing link (and ideally, an open-source missing link to gain support/good will from the community) to make writing for Maemo/Meego as easy as it is for Windows, if they are really serious about what they are doing.

Certainly not for this phone... this is a brick in my hand... and nokia knows it too.

Nope. And I find irony in paying for an update on the "most open" phone there is meanwhile "closed systems" don't have to pay.

I would never pay for a firmware upgrade- Thats horrible!! Imagine all the bugs you would have to put up with if you wouldn't pay to update!

That was what happened to the N810 and Diablo.

The problem is Nokia doesn't want the source totally free; if it's totally free someone would pick it up and fix all the bugs.

But we all know that N900 is a phone and its maker wants us to get rid of it in one or two years not to hold on to it forever.

That's just yet another reason why they should separate the software from the firmware. And keep the chunky browser and all it's settings off of my precious 256M, plz.

Well, I will not hold on to it forever, and in two years time when I can find the funds to change, it's all up to Nokia.

If my trust in Nokia then is the same as my trust in Nokia now, I may just have to move to Dalvik, as little as I want to.