Define "success".

If it's true that they planned to produce/sell 30.000 per month (based on previous market research) and now need to produce 100.000/month to keep up with the demand, it's a phenomenal success.

Hmm, I bought mine in January I think from the CPW - big posters of it all over the shop. These have now been replaced by big posters of the Nokia X6.
Anyway, pleased as punch with mine, especially as I very nearly bought the N97 mini until I saw it.
Maybe they will advertise it more when they feel it is stable - perhaps with PR1.2? If not then, it will be too late as the market will have moved on.
Here's to a Nokia 910 with a slightly larger screen, more RAM, and larger rootfs. Oh, and a working OviMaps 3 too

dont care what ppl say....I LOVE MY N900!!!

There has been no advertising campaign whatsoever here in Canada or none I know of anyways , people ask me everyday what kind of phone it is and where i got it from. Regardless of how many units were sold or if it was a success or not 5 million downloads is quite impressive for this tight community we have and that's a nice plus for maemo.org soo WOOHOOO!

It's not even announced (forget about advertising it) in India and still I know a lot of people who happily own it.
The truth is "the device chooses its owner"

I am happy that the N900 chose me

I saw half-page ads in The Telegraph (UK newspaper) a few months ago, over several days.

For chist's sake only in this forum would someone complain 5 million is not high enough!!

That's like winning 1 million quid in the lottery and saying "I only won 1 million pounds I wanted 5 million - what a disaster, I'll never be successful!!"

A quick question... Does this number of downloads also include the firmware upgrades?

@johnel

we are speaking about
* FREE downloads
* from a manufacturer who has around 40% smart phone marketshare
* the ONLY Handset with a Cortex A8 (decent) processor from this manufacturer
compare this to
1.5 million downloads per day for OVI
3 billion downloads to date for the iPhone
no number found for android

True, Nokia has a 40% (and shrinking depending who you listen to) market share but consider that most of that share is Symbian-based not Maemo. The only "phone" with Maemo is the n900. Maemo's market share is miniscule compared to Symbian phones.

The 1.5 million downloads is directly related to Nokia's marketshare. OVI supports many Nokia phones so the vast majority is for Symbian.

There has only really been "one" iPhone and many "revisions" of the hardware. The number of downloads is much larger. However Apple's definition of "application" downloads is very loose.

Android is almost certainly larger than 5 million downloads. Again this comes down to the "single" OS of android-based devices. Many manufacturers have produced android devices which means the market share of android is much larger.