[maemo-developers] No more 770 bug activity?

[From: Acadia Secure Networks]

David,

your "pain" is that of the proverbial pioneer in the old West (US) that 
ends up with a few arrows in his/her back. Similar in concept to the 
"pain" the people are feeling who paid 2X for HDTV's a year ago that 
were of less resolution/quality/size than the ones available today for 
1/2x the price.

As I see it, with respect to product support, Nokia is finding its way 
in this product category, Internet Tablet Computers, which are 
positioned somewhere between a smart mobile phone and a full fledged 
server but priced more like a smart mobile phone.

It could be worse. As far as I know, for the Windows Mobile OS, there 
are no patch releases, and, it seems, at most one feature pack upgrade 
per major release (e.g. 2003=>2003 SE, 5.0=>5.0+feature pack whatever, 
etc.).  Not only that, because of the vice-grip that the hand-set supply 
chain (manufacturer=>distributor=>mobile service provider) has on the 
product, it may not even be possible for a given end user to get a 
Windows Mobile feature pack, because someone in that chain is not 
supporting it on the specific handset/mobile service provider combo in 
question.

In comparison, what Nokia has done is a step forward in my opinion, 
although Microsoft, of course  is no paragon of perfection when it comes 
to product support.  I do think Nokia could mitigate this hw 
obsolescence problem for some customers, by having a very generous 
trade-in price to go from the 770 to the N800. In fact, from a marketing 
perspective this could make a lot of sense for a new product category 
like the Internet Tablet. That way Nokia would not have to leave its 
pioneering customers for dead on the "great plains" of product innovation.
!

Best Regards,

 

John Holmblad

 

Acadia Secure Networks


 



dave.neuer at pobox.com wrote:
> On 4/3/07, quim.gil at nokia.com <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> >Is there any chance to have a community maintained release? If
>> >I remember correctly some drivers are missing to get there,
>> >any chance to get the open sourced?
>>
>> >From a Nokia 770 customer point of view, any solution around this 
>> device
>> needs to come sooner than later, since devices get old quite fast
>> nowadays.
>
> Absolutely right.
>
>> From a Nokia Corporation perspective open sourcing components
>> might be a slow process even if all the parties involved have a clear
>> and common wish opening a specific source code. If we are talking about
>> hardware drivers, the process might be *really* slow. Therefore, there
>> are little chances that the solution for 770 customers comes from Nokia
>> opensourcing components, really.
>
> Understood.
>
>>
>> The current hacker edition looks like the best candidate to become a
>> more continued solution. Some people here have got a deep look at it.
>> What do you think?
>
> No, that's totally bogus: a binary-only distro that's supported by a
> community which doesn't have access to the source? Give me a break.
>
> Instead, how about Nokia get every bit of source used to build the
> last IT 2006 release which it has permission (both internal and
> external) to release in source form together in _one_ _repository_ and
> then let the community maintain that.
>
> It would end up being a sort of fork, and we'd need some help from
> Nokia to understand what proprietary components we'd need to replace
> (even if it's just in the form of hints like Igor's about power
> management that I posted a while ago) though obviously real
> documentation would be much better. Additionally, keeping it
> compatible with N800 OS releases would be challenging to say the least
> (maybe Nokia employees could help w/ that little bit, like backporting
> fixes to bugs in the public source).
>
> Anything else, from both a end-user and a non-Nokia developer
> perspective, IMO, is just crap.
>
> I mean come on, there are now users of $450 one-and-a-half year old
> devices out there (which didn't work well at all for 1/3rd of that
> time even for basic stuff) that are now being told they also won't get
> "official" fixes for KNOWN BUGS, ever.
>
> Give me a break.
>
> Dave
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