Actually, as an experienced MeeGo developer, this just makes me sad because they won't sell one to North Americans. Nokia did this to us with the N9 too, but at least they sent me a developer device. These guys still haven't released the official GSM/LTE frequencies it supports for some stupid reason, so I don't even know if I should bother trying to import one.

Eros is not a rubble pile. I hate quoting wikipedia, but "The asteroid 433 Eros, the primary destination of NEAR Shoemaker, was determined to be riven with cracks but otherwise solid. Other asteroids, possibly including Itokawa, have been found to be contact binaries, two major bodies touching, with or without rubble filling the boundary."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubble_pile

The Mandiant report was pretty damning.
"In over 97% of the 1,905 times Mandiant observed APT1 intruders connecting to their attack infrastructure, APT1 used IP addresses registered in Shanghai and systems set to use the Simplified Chinese language."
Oh, sure, it's probably just random hackers that really like that network...

Here's an update:
https://www.mandiant.com/blog/apt1-months-significantly-impacted-active-rebuilding/

Actually, Nokia is dropping support for everything: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=88222

A "Scam"? Seriously? People with 600+ posts on forums don't post lies for fun, and the 2nd guy replying stating that he got the same email pretty much proves he's not the one getting the email.

So quit saying wp7 / wp8 is "broken". Windows 8 is NOT windows PHONE 8.
If you write a windows phone app, it can't modify other app's data or storage.
If you use tools to upload or download files (like a database) from the device directly, you still can't touch stuff outside of the folder of your app.

It can run android apks and supports qt/qml and html5, so actually will be one of the easiest devices for developers to target. If they get this OS running on devices other than phones, that's a nice bonus for developers too! I'd say it's already a developers dream since that UI demo was shown on an n950, a devkit thousands of developers already have.

Running, like from a users point of view?
Why do they care?
It's good for developers, though. There's lots of open source software that expects x11, now to port it all you have to do is change the window size and maybe set a few flags to make it fullscreen. Maybe write a double buffer extension using pixmaps because nokia removed the one that is supposed to be in x11. If you're writing a new app, there's lots of other frameworks available on the n9 that wrap all the x11 stuff away so you never see it, so it's really not that painful. The important thing is we have some options, if Nokia didn't basically tell everyone that this phone was discontinued the minute they shipped it, developers would have invested a lot more in the device. Maemo devices are real 'hacker' devices, I don't know why, but we have unofficial apps and clients for all sorts of things that just don't happen on other platforms.

The phone itself is running x11 which is really great for porting apps to it. You get to use c++ and the great qt framework and extensions for pretty much everything, with the option of doing the UI in QML (a javascript based framework). You get to use deb packaging which you either know already or doesn't hurt to learn. If you use the qt creator sdk it does all the dirty work for you, but you can develop without it and just use the scratchbox environment instead if you prefer. Services run with upstart. The xterminal and related developer tools are already compiled and hosted in nokia's repositories, one click to install everything. The fcam camera api allows raw shooting and manual aperture and focus. Gnome tracker indexes your messages and music. The nolo bootloader can be set up to dual boot to another OS. I look forward to the new Sailfish OS promised by Jolla, I have faith the guys writing it are the ones behind some of the well designed N9 OS, and won't make it any worse. I tried windows phone 7 and you're not even allowed to run background services, let alone run your own code without paying a $99 fee.

China is just for R HQ is in finland
https://twitter.com/JollaMobile/status/253408126420779008

all their employees are from finland according to linkedin
http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?companyId=2649185&sortCriteria=R&keepFacets=&facet_CC=2649185