[citation][nom]hannibal[/nom]390 hours standby does sound reasonable... Nokia has allways made good phones, for making phone calls. Hopefully that feature is still there with reasonable "smart phone" features that were hard to achieve with symbian.Yep. meago was/is promising os, but it came/is too late for Nokia. Meego phone 4 years ago would have made whole different impact... *sigh*[/citation]
What you're impliying here could be quite right. But remember Microsoft did the same. They ditched Windows Mobile and build Windows Phone 7. They're shoveling it to everyones throat as the next best thing while in reality it has similar features than Nokia's Maemo harmattan bar the great UI of it.
Which is what I thought was the reason of Nokia's inpopularity, isn't it? I remember 'everybody' (read: the associated press/Nokia-haters) complaining about the "stale" UI of Symbian while in reality Symbian has the most elaborate feature-set of any Mobile OS including multitasking, copy & paste etc... Meamo was supposed to improve further on it AND combined with a new UI would be the 'next big thing'.
I believe the N9 has less features than a similar Symbian handset (there's no 2-way call recording, no FM-transmitter and probably some other missing things). Microsoft's Winphone 7 has even less features (multi-tasking more restrictive then in Maemo, there's also NO 2-eway callrecording and some other important things like e.g. being unable to access hidden SSID's).
So pushing Harmattan phones now or Winphones now wouldn't make a difference for Nokia. They're both too late. The market is already swamped with HTC, Samsung and LG winphones. Also Microsoft's restrictions wouldn't allow for Nokia to stand out much since they're designed to minimize differentiation. The only 2 thing that differentiate this phone from the others is the Carl Zeiss label on the camera and it's button-less design. It wouldn't surprise me that soon Samsung brings out a button-less galaxy winphone as well (probably at a better price as well).
This is a bad move. But hey, since our opinion doesn't matter anyway (Nokia's target audience are the 'emerging markets' and I live outside these 'markets thus...)