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Does that even exist?

At a minimum, there's Nexus.

Even vendors such as Motorola & Samsung have promised support and then abandoned it for some phones

Samsung has committed to monthly security updates on some models: http://security.samsungmobile....

However, I note the waffling about carriers and regions, and the fact that it doesn't specify how long they'll keep delivering updates.

Why outrun the bear when you just need to outrun the other lawyers?

I had to laugh at the "Possible GPS navigation" part, since they couldn't even get the GPS to work properly on their Galaxy S line of phones.

It looks like it will have the GPS. If you look at their teaser site, one of the pictures they flash through there shows the navigation screen. And they also advertize "navigation" as one of its features with moving/focusing words towards the end of the video.

Like Samsung and Sony Ericsson already have on the market.

Look at the N900 feature list - "Phone" is fourth down.

Maemo may power Nokia's high-end devices, but this is no reason to sound the death knell for Symbian. With regard to Nokia, they make a lot of phones that are not the N900, and do not cost 500 euro. There are also dozens of other companies supporting the Symbian Foundation, including many other manufacturers like Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

Symbian^4 will use Qt as its UI layer, and Maemo is moving into a similar direction (that's why Nokia bought Trolltech!) - targeting both platforms should be quite simple.

I'm an avid fan of Nokia and Symbian phones from Philippines, and I'd like to share my interest in exploring new features in mobile technology particularly this new device and its Maemo platform for mobile communicators.

I'd like to witness how it performs well as a device, mobile communicator, and internet tablet, and be able to know what lies behind this new mobile OS.

I also want to know how worthy to have this device over the other existing and upcoming competitors and rivals in its level, and chat and meet people with the same interest.

I hope we can share each and everyone's knowledge on this stuff among all of electronic gadgets we've had. http://www.Nokia-N900.org is nice place to hangout.

I have never used an N97 personally, but I'm sorry to hear that you're having so much trouble with it. It is not the only Symbian-powered device in the world!

Bugs get fixed. Technology improves. It looks like Nokia will use Symbian as their smartphone OS, and have their MID class use Maemo. They are easily big enough to support both. Other Symbian Foundation member companies will improve the OS and use it on whatever devices they want to do. The Samsung i8910HD and Sony Ericsson Satio are another couple of current Symbian S60v5 phones, and as the platform moves forward as open-source software, anything could happen. Android's Dalvik VM could be ported to Symbian. That could be interesting!

As for the SDK, I think that it's built on Eclipse, and there's a GCC toolchain - maybe not with S60 5th Edition, but with Symbian^1 or Symbian^2 (the OSS releases). It takes time for a commercial product to adjust to a new open source life. Give a while. No harm.

Look at the N900 feature list - "Phone" is fourth down.

Maemo may power Nokia's high-end devices, but this is no reason to sound the death knell for Symbian. With regard to Nokia, they make a lot of phones that are not the N900, and do not cost 500 euro. There are also dozens of other companies supporting the Symbian Foundation, including many other manufacturers like Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

Symbian^4 will use Qt as its UI layer, and Maemo is moving into a similar direction (that's why Nokia bought Trolltech!) - targeting both platforms should be quite simple.

From the Handango website:: Androidâ, BlackBerry®, Palm®, Windows Mobileâ, Symbian OSâ - I don't see Windows CE in the list. In fact: theses are all the smart phone operating systems which are currently available (Apart from iPhone OS X that is).

I agree with you that future is bleak for Symbian. But still:

http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-n97
http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/satio
http://omniahd.samsungmobile.com/

None of which are older then 6 month. The reason that I think Symbian is on a demise is not that there are no new devices - it is that the available new devices are missing the "wow - cool" factor.

And last not least: How do you define SmartPhone OS so that the N97 is not included? My definitions is Keyboard and/or Touchscreen and native user installable applications. The N97 qualifies for all three points.

Martin

one tiny little bit.

THE COMPETITION

When the article talks about all the things they needed to work out how the phone connects to networks and how the brain gets microwaved (or not) it fails to mention, that this is only news to Apple, not all the other mobile phone manufacturers of the world. Especially when the article talks about the phone being light years ahead it completely resolves into pure Apple fanboy talk.

Those are just three examples of phones that you could compare to the Iphone:
http://www.lge.com/products/model/detail/ke850.jhtml
http://www.htc.com/product/03-product_htctouch.htm
http://uk.samsungmobile.com/mobile/SGH-F700

I have one just like the last Samsung model. Mine also has WLan and, like the Samsung, it has a full sized keyboard. Nokia is not even on that list. All of the phone makers have a wide variaty of phones to fit every customers preferred style. Candy bar being the best liked. Many have important features that the Iphone is lacking. Like UMTS support to get decent speed for surfing whe web. Opera build a decent web browser complete with a proxy that "refits" webpages so they look good on a small screen years ago. It is written in Java and works on many phones.

The mobile phone market has enough players that the competition actually works (not like the OS market for PCs). Of those three phones up the all of them use a different OS for example. The HTC model even uses Microsoft Mobile, an OS that sucks less and less with each version, because they face a steep competition by Symbian. And Google just joined.

There are just two things that were new with the IPhone. First was the touchscreen that you can operate on with more than one finger. A feature that is pretty cool and was therefore swiftly copied by everyone else.

The second thing is the Apple marketing. The only thing right now that makes Apple stand out. That and their tie in with Itunes. Itunes has such a large market share, it almost became a monopoly. And now they try to extend that power to other products and markets. Sounds familiar? Another reason why the IPod-ITunes connection works so good.

And that brings us to the last little thing which the article good completely right. Back in 2002 (I would say even earlier, but the article says that was when Jobs woke up to that fact) it became clear that phones will aquire more and more memory and computing power, just like the regular PC. Some people prefer to have funtions seperate on different devices. They like their music player, phone and PDA, or just one of them. Other people like to have everything in one device. And Jobs/Apple wanted to sell Ipods to those people as well. So the Ipod needed to become a phone and a PDA.

And it did. Ipod touch is a PDA and the Iphone is a smartphone.

That's odd... in Europe I installed the WM6 upgrade for the Blackjack (SGH-i600 in these parts) ages ago.

http://www.samsungmobile.com/promotion/i600/index.jsp

Found an example of what I was talking about: the samsung Z130 mobile phone has a pivoting display in a very small package.

http://europe.samsungmobile.com/eng/mobile_phone/s gh-p300/specification.jsp

maybe a bit wider than other models, but most probably the slimmest one around.

Phone calls. This may be because I'm from the US, and we get the crap phones here from what I hear. The UI on these things gets worse every year.

I wish there were "open" phones with a free SDK so I could make the UI worthwhile.

My current phone is pretty simple, so I can tolerate the numerous issues I have with it, but are these people on crack when they program these things?

My phone is paid for by my employer and is "part of my job", I don't want or need a cell phone personally.

...The contact list is purely alphabetical, so I either have to bastardize someone's name that I call frequently to put it on the top of the list, or scroll down past the numbers I don't use frequently to get to the number I use frequently. Oh, but I could use the voice recognition to call right? ... The two color LED would be perfect for this notification, but instead, its only used to tell me that the phone is on by obnoxiously blinking or that the phone is charging

... There are a slew of unintuitive icons on the top of the screen, and I guess I have to look at the book to know what those mean.

The settings don't have any information about what the setting is used for. For example, under System/Select System it says "Home is B" and the three options for "Selecting the system" are Home only, Automatic A, Automatic B. So WTF is "Home is B"?

Is it possible to run J2ME games in a PC using free software, proprietary software available at no charge, or proprietary software available for less than 100 USD for one seat?

Yes, just google for J2ME emulators, I think Sun even has one included when you download the J2ME development kit. I know for sure Sony Ericsson/Nokia/Motorola et al have emulators. You might have to register at their developer sites first, but it should be free if you are a student or doing non-commercial development. After all, they want developers to make software that works as good as possible for their own devices.

Mobile developer sites:
Sony Ericsson
Nokia
Samsung
Motorola

Some good intro sites:
J2ME Gamer
Midlet.org

Does this Bluetooth thing work even with phones sold by prepaid service providers? Or does, for instance, Virgin lock its phones so that I can't just buy a Virgin phone and a Bluetooth adapter for my PC and transfer games that way?

I don't know how things work in the US, but I haven't heard of anyone locking Bluetooth file transfers on the phone, it would defeat the whole purpose of having Bluetooth. So you should be able to buy a simple Bluetooth USB dongle for your PC ($20) and then use a OBEX push program to transfer the game. The phone senses what the file is (game, image, mp3...) and where to put it, and will ask you if you want to accept it.

Over the air transmission though (OTA) is often locked to the service provider you got the SIM from.

I used Mandrake 10.1 when I was playing around and all drivers and programs were available as official packages on the CDs. No compiling or configuring needed after install to get Bluetooth working, everything worked like a charm.