orcishgamer: I don't know if I'd call Maemo a flop, it got combined into Meego and the n900 is widely regarded as one of the best phones on the market a couple years after launch. It's easy to say the dev community is lacking until you realize you have the entire Debian repo available (not that I'd try to run The Gimp on one).
As I said, none of those apps presents the user with an interface appropriate for a mobile device, so the fact that it has the entire Debian repo is virtually useless to the casual and even most geek users.
orcishgamer: The toolkits actually are pretty solid, but not as easy to program on as Android, plus iOS has some bizarro reality surrounding it that that's where all the money is so the cash in crowd gravitates that way (I'm not sure I miss them, really).
Well, considering that mobile developers hate them, especially the abomination that is Symbian, and the fact that they haven't even used QT despite migrating developers to it tells me that no, they aren't pretty solid.
orcishgamer: but Meego has some real potential. Don't count it out yet.
Nokia itself abandoned it; they had time and money invested in it and were unable to ship a product in the same timeframe that Microsoft wrote a whole new OS almost from scratch and Android went through whole revisions.
MeeGo is as good as dead right now, and was from the start; they lacked developers, they lacked community interest, they lacked marketability and they lacked a device to show it off. It was nice as a hack project, but that's it. It could of never got mature enough to reach the market, not to speak of creating a dent in it.
wpegg: Well I think this is a good move. It has been described as the "losers alliance", but then who else do they ally with?
I agree with this; it was either Android, where Nokia couldn't compete on the low end devices that are flooding in from Asia, or ally with HP/Palm OS which is mostly impossible because they see them as friendly competition. I mentioned my view on developing their own OS above.
As it stands right now Nokia made the smart move of going where it can be the largest player in the field (of WP7 handset manufacturers) and grow with it. Couple this with the fact that Nokia will have more options to modify WP7 than the rest of the handset manufacturers makes it more like Nokia licenses WP7 for $0 Billion.
