Let me just point out that Maemo exists, it works right now, they were happy to dump that off. Why not jump back to a ship that already floats? :-) The geek in me would love an enhanced Maemo or the much better MeeGo. Doesn't matter, both are good.

When you look at MeeGo from a normal human perspective, the user interface that is, it seems to me it's a childlike cross between Android and iOS instead of anything unique and interesting. Cartoon characters? - really, we moved past that in 80's. People want glitzy transitions, a nice 3D beveled interface, and real time interaction - meaning you touch the screen and something happens instantly.

Your average human also wants tons of near identical pointless applications to choose from - all of these must live in a store that utterly fails to categorize anything correctly, this store must also excel at making your searches present you with the opposite of what you actually want - but you wont notice because it shows you a bunch of new shiny stuff, distractions. As a normal human you don't really know what you want anyway, and your attention span is microscopic in length :-)

Android, anyone that likes the N900 will not be happy with a migration in that direction. It's clunky, not very intuitive, and the UI just gets in your way and slows you down.

WM7? I don't know, haven't used it, but I believe slashdot posted a story yesterday or the day before to say Microsoft would open it up to be more geek friendly.

Ultimately it's safe to say that Nokia are being monumentally stupid with their decision making process right now - give it six months they might decide to go with Android after all :-)

Seems to me most people on here (not all thankfully) believe what they read !!.

You lot need to get much more realistic and see everything for what is is based on past history and stop jumping to conclusions like... oh we have a new wizz at the helm of Nokia.

Something very wrong about all of this and it will only take time to find out just what will happen.... till then WAIT.

Ok, I haven't done very deep research about MeeGo development. But from what I've seen, a consumer handset release in 2011 pretty much needs to be based on the upcoming 1.2 branch (due in April. Since the development cycle is 6 months, a handset based on 1.3 would have made it "a 2012 event".)

So I have 2 basic questions, that I hope some of the more directly involved people might be able to answer.

1. Was 1.2 (including the seemingly top-secret Nokia handset UX) on track to be production-ready on time?
2. Is the overall user experience of 1.2+handset UX in its current state competitive with iOS 4 or Android 2.x?

Whenever you post, all i see is:

You have assessed the whole platform, based purely on the reference (read: vendor-neutral, test) theme? *That* seems childish.

The source as in:

WTF happened between Nokia's golden years and now?

It's certainly isn't MS (nor Google, Apple, etc).




IE:

You're fat, broke and ignorant... and for some reason your sexy wife ran off with a young dashing rich dude.

What's the true source of the problem?

(Then again, due to the ignorance level this may not pose a problem to the subject.).

Some people truly believe everything they read. Nokia had on Friday 130 jobs open from this month alone for MeeGo.

Interesting, jobs.nokia.com (US-only, I think) shows 20 and nokia.taleo.net (global) 71 when searching for "meego" today.

Considering they were demoing a unit to carriers and got rejected on the hinge I suspect that it was ready. Of course, we don't know about the finer details so this segues into your second question:

We don't know, because it's entirely hidden within Nokia. And that has absolutely nothing to do with MeeGo, despite the entirety of this thread.

Nokia was building on top of the Linux kernel, GNU libs, and QT. All of the heavy lifting was done for them. They only needed to release a solid basic OS. I think that this is exactly what it looks like, a former MS exec whose intentions had always been to bring Microsoft in regardless of Nokia's best interests. Nokia could have partnered with Google, reskinned Android and used OVI services instead of Google services and they'd have their stopgap platform. They'd still have OVI store revenue, and most people probably wouldn't even know it was an Android device. Tablets would be covered, and with steady revenue and possibly even some growth, development could have continued on Meego/QT without the pressure of pushing it out prematurely, offering both short and long term solutions. Investors would have been satisfied, and business would've moved on. I don't think the problem was Meego, there was a lot of enthusiasm over it and they had a prominent partner in Intel. The unpleasant truth is that the Nokia board made a very unwise choice in Elop and should have seen this coming.