I wish I had a chance to follow this topic after my lunchtime post as I see a lot of replies I'm interested in.
AC points out leaked images of a supposed N9 were of the E7: This means my camera comment may be unneeded - I hope so.
Hyartep says the n8 is a cameraphone and the n9 will have other selling features: This may be true, but it is still disappointing and doesn't entice me as a customer. The camera is now a very integral part of a flagship phone and when you've already done that much design work AND are getting such critical acclaim, why not just reuse the whole damn camera module in the next phone and upgrade the display, processor, and other modules.
CockMonster says it is unlikely Nokia is capable of backporting Meego to N8: I read of people speculating the machine just isn't powerful enough, but haven't come across details on why the hardware isn't capable of doing it. If it is a hard task that Nokia doesn't want to be bothered with, they need to streamline their future offerings and use standard architectures (as was suggested in another post) to get both OSs working.
ChunderDownunder says:
"Nokia talks about open source. How about instead of a symbian or meego phone - one device architecture that can run both.
The handset division can then focus on compelling hardware."
I couldn't agree more. I agree that those that want Symbian should be able to stay with it (though I wrote my first post as a customer that would just view it as a transition to Meego.
sznupi (719324) says:
They only said that N-series will go with Meego from now on, it leaves plenty of space for Symbian (and devices with the latter exploit the somewhat more frugal hardware requirements, so a port of Meego is not feasible; ...
True. I'm not very interested in frugal hardware phones anymore - maybe when phones get absolutely amazing, frugal then will seem satisfactory and I'll go away from top of the line, but for now, I find the top of the line phones lacking. What we need is N8 camera like performance in every arena the phone works in: GPS performance, screen display, etc.
pavon gives a link from July 2 from Nokia stating future N series phones could use Symbian^4. As another poster (dartservo) said, I heard they abandoned Symbian^4 but perhaps they will use Symbian (incrementally updated) on N series phones. I still am not enthusiastic about it. Maybe if most of the apps I care about run on either OS (say using Qt), and Nokia releases a device that can run both, I'd find that I actually like Symbian. But it sure has a lot of negative publicity to overcome for me. It might not be that bad, and it might evolve into something better. But I wouldn't invest in a Symbian only phone at this point.
Finally wintermute000 says there are a ton of third party apps for offline map usage. True, I own two of them for the iPhone (Topo Maps and TopoPoint USA). They are both OK and perhaps it is unfair to compare them to Google Maps with a WiFi connection, but I don't find them as user friendly (they aren't street map oriented though). At some point I'll try an Open Street Map solution like Gaia GPS. I'd like to be able to download and save maps on a computer and then swap them in and out of the phone to save space. My first comment on third party apps related to programs that that let you cache Google's own maps. (I think there were some when I looked on the iPhone before I lost interest in that platform). But to have the main mapping program for a platform support this feature out of the box (Ovi Maps), that is way better.
This was fun. I typed up some thoughts earlier which offers advice to Nokia on what would win me as a customer in terms of hardware specifics at Matthew Miller's blog (http://www.zdnet.com/tb/1-86976, search for Dara Parsavand). I hope next year Nokia will have some interesting kit to read about.