It doesn't rule it out either...

How do we know the US didn't just use it for their own weapons? I guess it says somewhere, perhaps the Russians did some 'inspection' things to make sure it was being used for power, along the lines of Iran?

> I'm guessing the third was most likely.

Agreed.

right...stupid apostrophe use again...

Well, yes, in a way...that's why I conceded the point. However, the n950 was not the *direct* successor - there were at least a couple in between the n950 and n900 - one n950 look-alike (I preferred it to the n950) was even labelled 'n9'. It wasn't the same OS or even the same people who developed it (it was done in parallel somewhat) - though the maemo5 guys did join in the Maemo6/MeeGo development later on, once maemo5 was 'done'. Perhaps some of the lower-level guys moved earlier, I'm not sure, and some team leaders/architects too, I suppose.

Of course, there were also several other Nokia phones actually released between the n900 and n950, some of them looking suspiciously like the totally unreleased models we were using for development (the N8, for example).

So, perhaps you can understand my reluctance to accept that the n950 was *the* unreleased successor. It wasn't *the* successor because it wasn't released, and it wasn't the 'unreleased successor' because there were others in between that were also unreleased (and some that were but were symbian). The n950 was in a 'grey area' though, since it was 'given away' to non-Nokia developers....so it is just 'not that simple' :)

*I* was on the engineering team and I have an n900, n950 and n9 somewhere around here - my wife still uses the n9. It was only a successor in that it came after the n900 - it shared nothing much else with the n900, apart from perhaps the base linux was similar, but the middleware and UI were totally different.

Like I say, if you meant to say that it just came after the n900, then that is correct. I took you to mean something more than that.

> the phone is in beta

i was referring to the claim that the n950 was the successor to the n900. I suppose it was if you take 'successor' to mean simply 'the one after', but it was really much more of an n9-with-keyboard-and-no-nfc, than anything much to do with the n900.

> allowed

Really? The board are the ones to blame, but not because the 'allowed' anything, but because they installed incentives to do exactly what he did do. I'm tempted to think they wanted to get out of mobile phones altogether. I totally don't blame Elop - he did an excelent job - I blame those who asked him to do what he did.

The biggest thing I noticed when moving from the N900 to the N950 (and, therefore, also N9) was the improvement in audio quality. The n950 made the n900 sound distinctly bland and wooly.

So, I now wonder if the Neo900 upgrade replaces the audio bits so that the audio improves too. Do you know?

> n950 (unpublished successor to the n900),

Hrm, imo, not really...only in that it had a keyboard. Otherwise, it was very different. I would call it an unpublished N9-with-keyboard-and-no-NFC. I forget if there were any other differences - oh, it was quite straightforward to replace the battery on the n950, unlike the n9.

I think that's not true, since not all Andoird phones come with Google Play - I can't even install it on my ZTE Geek, though I'd be happy to find out how to do so. I can install Amazon's equivalents and it comes with some other store(s) too, so I don't feel like I'm missing much.

Wow, I was thinking the same thing. The punctuation is terrible and makes it painful to read. I have to parse a few of those points at least twice - I didn't bother after the first few.

> what you define as "antisocial behaviour".

Perhaps he/she was just being literal - I think it is literally correct, no? Perhaps he's English who are famed for their use of 'understatement'.

Wikipedia says he was English, but born in India.

iinm, something similar happened in the UK too, if you can count the Isle of Man as the UK :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
"Isle of Man church service marks Manx link to Holocaust"

"The Manx Holocaust memorial service is a "poignant" reminder of the Isle of Man's role as an internment centre during WW2, said organisers.

Between 1940 and 1945 thousands of Jewish refugees were held as "enemy aliens" in six island internment camps."

Shameful. Kind of reminds me of Gitmo...