I appreciate the frustration we all have with seeing an apparently leaked phone and no word on the future of internet tablets.

For me personally, having purchased a 770, an 800, and an 810, I don't know if I will be able to or perhaps be motivated to buy a maemo phone. But either way I hope for its success and may recommend to people who are in the market for that kind of phone.

I do intuit however, that a successful maemo phone is to all of our benefits. The assumption is of course is that since the phone has apparently been leaked it is closer to release and higher priority to a tablet.

And I would argue that without a successful phone the Nokia internet tablet days are numbered. There may even be no new Nokia tablet (if one is in the pipeline) if the phone fails.

Now people will say we'll just move Mer to some other device and we'll be able to have our tablets without Nokia. But doesn't Mer stand on the contribution of Ubuntu and Nokia, and the Mer developers themselves.

I like the idea of a meamo phone. However with that said I like my N810 screen size. I saw a LG Shine commercial for AT&T were the actor checked some girl out from the reflection of his phone. I still remember that commercial and unfortunately own an LG Shine among other phones. Hence you need to spend some money on your branding to make some money. And right now no one knows what a “maemo” is. However, a few short years ago I had never heard of an “LG” anything, now they are commonplace in my market.

I recommend two things, at least for the US market: (1) partnering with Google/Android if possible (in a tangential not a direct way—I don’t need control freaks all over my applications) they are playing catch up also and may want to let you join in their party, and (2) get “Ovi” involved with maemo (now!), I can’t believe that meamo wasn’t directly included in this—why would you expect people to stand in line to buy your product when you don’t even stand behind it?

This supposed N900 is too close to the new N97.
The keyboard is too small, 4 rows is a minimum, and don't place keys too close to the screen border, like in N810, it makes typing uneasy.

To succed with the next tablet Nokia should not listen the Maemo community . I agree that th big thing is the social/community/twitery/facebooky hype and the geek user dony seem really into. Write such applications is ubereasy (even a non programmer like me was able to write a twitter and a flickr application in python in a couple of hours). The community just dont care (maybe in the future). Nokia should take some great technical advices and learn some valuable lessons from the comunity but the answers are hidden deeper in how and what people developed. Everybody wish for a better camera, a working gps, an acceleometer, a compass, an infrared camera (ok, this just me), a faster processor with the unleashed 3d. Just asking seem a pointless exercize. I would prefer a Nokia releasing the 3d support and a Maemo 5 on the actual hardware and motivate the developer to push the hardware limits and release the bew hardware in 2010 (with new omap4?). The new hardware marketing hype beginned way to early and killed the developers initiative stalling everything for months if not for an entire year. this seemed to me as a big wast of human resources. Pushing on the hardware ego key is imo a mistake. My strategy? Just a restyle with a better cam an accelerometer and asexier look with a new os update for the 2009.

Study this gameplan then improve it. Previuosly Android has been criticized about being less than open and restrictive of their apps, such as tethering. Nokia can be more open and not cave in to carrier demands and fully embrace the opensource community. Now go study the plan...