Notices

I am afraid that I may be not able to find many applications for Maemo 5 OS when I but N900 like symbian OS which has huge number of useful and different applications..what is your opinion concerning that ??

I am afraid you are correct. However, things should improve, slowly at first, but with more and more impetus as time goes on.

Don't forget that the phone hasn't even been released yet while Symbian has been around for many years already.

Indeed. It would be pretty hard to have a huge collection of applications available when there is only around 300 devices out there for developers to test on.

Unfortunately the SDK alone is not close to good enough for testing purposes so even if you write the perfect application, you have no clue how it will actually perform on the real thing.* There will be a lot of software sat waiting for testing which should be available faster once more devices are out there - a few months after release perhaps.

It is unlikely the N900 will ever compare to the iPhone or Windows Mobile as they are well established at this point with the N900 being the first Maemo 5 device is a blank slate and a huge risk for commercial developers as right now, they have no customers because nothing currently will run the software.

Even if the N900 becomes a huge hit I suspect it would take 6-12 months (most likely the N9x0 will be out by then) before any commercial developers start trickling on board.

That is not to say the N900 will not have software. It already has a large selection of open-source software and the potential for anything that comes bundles with Linux to be ported to it. But for many people that will not be enough.

You shouldn't expect it to be comparable to Symbian and certainly not iPhone - in some ways its better, in some ways its worse. Its a device designed for a different market and a different perspective. For those of us who are already mostly using open-source software its the best thing since sliced bread, but people expecting it to be the same as other phones - you would be better to wait and see it in person to know if it does all you want it to do.

* This is normal, no SDK emulates 100% of the hardware and at 100% the speed of the real thing. Writing an emulator like that would take years.

please guys, remember that iPhone had no apps when it first released either, this stuff takes time!

N900 is the first of its class, it wont have many apps out when it's released but like someone else said, you also have full internet to help with certain things too if you need.

I hope that Maemo has more free stuff that's useful like the iPhone though. Symbian was disappointing because of certificate annoyances AND because all the good stuff cost at least 30-40 USD.

I hope that ability to port existing Linux programs to Maemo 5 give us many good applications in short time.