I have been using nokia mobile phones all my phones. There are two things that you will see in a nokia device no matter if it was a symbian device or a maemo device.

1. Lots of new features
2. Lots of bugs.

Nokia always introduces new features. For instance who does not remember the nokia 6610 which in those days was the best phone. It had all the greatest features from multi tasking to fm radio. But the 6610 had so many bugs. I brought all the internet tablets to date starting from the 770 to the n900. Nokia was the first one to have devices with large touch screen with internet access. It had great features like pc style multitasking. Then came the n800 with the ability to video chat on portable devices and also be online 24x7. Those devices had thousands of bugs.

In the same time apple released the first iphone which really had no features. The only new thing which apple really brought was capacitative touch screens and accelerometers. The ui was simple and it had very few bugs. It always used to work the way it was supposed to because there were no complicated features. Slowly the iphone got each feature and with the release of iphone 4.0 it will be on par to some extent with the features of the n900.

So i was wondering if going forward towards meego we want the most advanced features with nokia grade bugs or we wanted a more dumbed down version with lesser bugs.

Neither

but I want the ability that the community can add new features and remove bugs.
Not that this should encourage Nokia to release half-baked, bug-ridden products....

But if I really have to make a choice between more features and less bugs, I choose less bugs: bugs imply poor quality (software-wise), which can scare away potential buyers and give a bad image for the company.

Features mean nothing if they are all buggy and don't work properly....

Are you listening Nokia?

For my day to day 'smartphone': i NEED good, stable features (email, browser, media player, phone functions). Any additional features are welcome as long as they don't introduce any instabilities.

But, to answer your real question: You can have an open platform such as maemo and still maintain a bug-free system on it aa long as the core applications get enough TLC. Herein lies the bulk of the complaints against maemo on N900. They don't have much excuse to release software codes that are inferior to iphone's original release 3 years ago (see:modest).

Ps: original iphone has 2 'killer features'; the browser and the media player (ipod software). Back then there weren't any other mobile browser with such well designed zoom/pan controls with good javascript sipport.

More bugs for sure, I love being frustrated, wasting my time, swearing and pounding my head against the wall.

Voted more features because I'm a fan of "Release early, release often", rolling releases, direct community involvement... etc.

All software has bugs.. the idea is to identify them, fix them, and release that fix ASAP. More people looking for bugs == more bugs found.

@fatalsaint: that's great for community releases... but... remember PR1.2 ;(

Which is precisely my point. I think it should have been released shortly after it was frozen. That was what? 2 months ago?

Were/is/are/could there be bugs? Yes, of course. But it also fixes many other bugs. Sometimes, fixing bugs begets other bugs. Then those bugs get fixed.

Constant cycle.

Actually, ideally (IMHO), each of the different softwares should have been released as separate updates and not all bunched into one big new "version" but each part of it updated separately as they were fixed.

But, that's just me.

open wide, release early, release often.

(Poll does not list my response)

I don't know enough about Nokia's predicament on PR1.2, but I certainly wouldn't underestimate their judgement... there's gotta be a good reason if they delay (?) such release for so long.

Here's one take: Their rate of adoption for firmware updates gotta be pretty high too, due to:

1. The main selling point of N900 is that it can stay always connected to the net
2. Their auto-update mechanism is pretty effective in notifying users whenever there are new updates available
3. After that, it's just a matter of 2-3 clicks to get things going.

So any mistakes (on PR1.2) will be propagated really quick to a big majority of their userbase. Something that shouldn't be lightly regarded... especially if the problem involves disabling of the device.

Yeah, I agree about making core app modules separate from the base release;