Yeah, sure enough. ...If I remember correctly, there is something about the mistral winds being mysterious and unpredictable, too.

Name aside, the road map does look good. I'm looking forward to the next firmware revision, but then I haven't even gotten around to doing the rsmmc memory expansion hack yet, so my 770 still has lots of room to grow.

Actually the urban legend around here is that Mistral follows a 3/6/9 rule -- ie it always blows for three, six or nine days at a time. The locals swear by it, but then they also have a reputation for liberal interpretation of reality (especially in Marseille :-)

My gut feeling indeed is that most Maemo 2.0 features won't be here until a late update to OS 2006... And as it's a roadmap for an OSS project it might take years before the hardware and software is ready for some of the features to be really useful. Certainly the new release will have some rather exciting new features and there is going to be new buzz when it hits the servers.

I learned long ago to not trust sales-droids. The same droid told me to have the newest OS installed would require mailing the device back to Nokia. I could tell you the story he gave me about things breaking if you don't update too, but FUD isn't needed here.

From its initial project of 1Q2006, Nokia changed the anticipated release of included VoIP and IM to 2Q some while back. So long ago I don't even remember.

But the 2006 OS and any firmware upgrades will be installable by users, so that advice doesn't make any sense. Strange.
I don't think the arrival of any OO, non-C language could be overhyped. It should expand the development universe considerably and speed things up.

I completely agree; the roadmap's impressive indeed. I hope as much time was invested into fixing the current round of issues/unpredictability, especially in Opera. In random 770-related-web-site-jumping, I've seen some talk about wanting to adopt Minimo provided it could be slimmed down. That could fix all the browser issues.

All in all, given the bulk of us holding 770s in hand are early adopters and are forgiving in the number of issues we've encountered, the entire team behind the 770 has done a fantastic job. I've never, ever had a device that I'm still excited to use 5-6 months after purchasing it. It's also encouraging to see vigorous development like disq has been doing on MaemoPad+ and Kontori has done on the media convertor. Deepest thanks guys.

Agreed ! My Psions and my Zaurus certainly kept me excited for more than 6 months before they became mundane day-to-day appliances, but there is a difference here : the Psion 5mx was the last generation of a dying platform, and when I bought my Z760 it was already clear nothing new would be forthcoming from Sharp software-wise. So yes, this feeling of something important being created, these expectations of good things to come, this particular excitement is new, and fun. Let's hope the 770/maemo teams get enough backing from Nokia to pull it through...

Looks good. Once this arrives I will be one big step closer to being able to migrate to my 770 from my Palm Tungsetn C rather than using it for some of the functions.

A statement about speeding up the existing device with/without need of RS-MMC card would be useful.

I see that there is a warning for application developers that they will have to rebuild to be able to distribute for the updated OS. Wasn't clear to me if this also means that existing installed 3rd-party apps will stop working (or will the firmware upgrade remove all installed apps anyway - I did my upgrade before installing anything extra so I don't know for sure).

Yes, the upgrade will remove everything currently installed and none of the existing apps will immediately work.

Hopefully, there'll be a developer release so we can get them working before end-users upgrade.

A lot of the ports were recompiled with a small number of changes... hopefully the momentum we witnessed with the original 770 configuration keeps up when 2006 launches.

(I *need* my sodoku... it's like crack)