What I find striking is the illogic in lack of 3G standard in USA. Always different frequencies, and then the loud complaints about one or more not supported. Geez, get your standards straight!

Mabe it makes sense to read into different definitions of socialism. The compare chart here I found pretty useful.

Furthermore, Lord Raiden's thread "One likely reason why our cell rates will never improve." bears a similar discussion as the one held in the last couple of posts in this thread.

When I say socialist I don't mean like Italy during WW2. I mean modern socialist like how some countries in Europe are socialist. Maybe my use of the term was to broad. But the link allnameswereout pointed out will explain for me. As you can see while indeed the US is still more corporatist capitalist than any other country, it's also socialist. Hence my it's half foot in one, half foot in the other.

Thank you allnameswereout.

Does anybody have any news concerning whether the N900 wil be able to upgrade to Harmattan??

No. I doubt whether Nokia's even sure about that at this point.

Is the next device multi-touch enabled?

The n900 can never have that support, how would Nokia deal with this?

Multi-touch brings in new ways of handling the content on the screen, and such ways cannot be backported to the N900.

I believe the N900 won't be able to run Harmattan.
But I strongly believe the community will be asked to step in again.

Anidel

This is a rumor I keep seeing pop up based on multitouch capability in Qt 4.6. Nobody outside of Nokia can answer this question, though.

Look at the iPhone or the G1, is multitouch really a make-or-break proposition there?

I disagree, but we'll just have to wait and see.

Troll^WQt Software guys have working implementation of multitouch for Qt. Problem at the moment lies not in Qt but in underlying platform. AFAIU implementation worked on Windows but not on Linux and they were cooperating with kernel people on that.

General Qt philosophy is to publish cross-platform-working features. If they will be able to push working multitouch feature on all platforms it will be in 4.6. If not - we will wait for 4.7. Just my opinion.

Well, computers aren´t "O.S. locked" for quite a long time now. O.S. upgrading ability is something very important, at least for me, to consider the N900 a real mobile computer.

I would tend to agree. I don't think Nokia is where it wants to be with regard to high-end phones and tablets. I think multi-touch is a likely direction to better compete with other phones and enhanced multimedia is another possible direction to better compete with MIDs and PMPs. Then there's 4G, USB3, not to mention advances in CPUs, GPUs, RAM, SSD, etc.

I suspect that the N9x0 will parallel the N8x0. We will see an enhanced N910 sometime next year that still runs Maemo 5. We will then see a new N1000 in 2011 that runs Maemo 6. Maemo 6 will require the hardware enhancements of the N1000 and will not be usable on the N9x0.

The community will then begin work on an open source version code named Merkin.

That sounds like a realistic move, if you ask me. I think the changes in Maemo 6 can be substantial if Nokia takes enough time to make it right. That would allow for an optimised version of Maemo5, while still allowing N900 users to feel like their devices are supported for a bit longer.

My hope is that once the first solid device with Maemo6 is out, that should mark the first step in a more stable direction. In other words, I think the N900 and Maemo5 are not where Nokia wants to be (certain important features missing, it still uses GTK+, etc).

However, Maemo 6 should then be the real foundation, one that really sets the stage for evolution in these devices more like PCs evolve, with perhaps no fundamental changes for years. That would allow for OS upgrades to be used for years.

In such environment, an old device would just suffer from less powerful hardware and perhaps some non-critical features missing. Just like PCs do.

Of course, that would not make buying another device such an important thing, and perhaps device sales would decrease, but then again, that´s where the industry is going. PC manufactures realised that selling devices is no longer a business that can bring them income as it used to, and the same will apply to mobile phones quickly.

Like some other posters already mentioned, Nokia should focus on the application store and things like that as their future strategy, not about the device sales, specially considering that in a close future I see the posibility of installing Maemo on any device, just like Linux can be installed on most PCs.