Maemo & Nokia suck
Yeah, I agree with the AC. They managed to screw up a Debian distribution with apt and packages, yet to upgrade you had to reflash your ROMs and lose all your apps and customizations! In the last rev, they finally realized "oh yeah, we can do that package thing" - it took 'em 4 OS revs to figure that out.
Plus, instead of good ol' debugged crond, they went to some sort of alarm daemon that died frequently, meaning you lost alarms and reminders a LOT. That should tell you the "not invented here" mentality we're dealing with.
Also in the last rev, they went to HUGE ICONS IN THE START MENU. They're so large that you can only get 5 menu items, which pretty much eliminates any user-friendlyness. The excuse was "people can't hit the old menu items with the fingers" - A) there was no complaints, at least on internettablettalk.com, B) I had no such problems, and C) that's what the stylus is for!
Later, we discovered that the guy that did the touchscreen stuff left, and the new guys didn't know how to use the pressure readings system, so they screwed up the GUI to match.
Then they announced another rev called Freemantle about 11 months ago. However "it won't be compatible with the N800/N810" and will need an unspecified new device. Then the tumbleweeds appeared and we haven't heard anything since.
I believe Nokia has laid off all its Maemo developer staff as there's been NO new development, no maemo.com upgrades and no new news on internettablettalk.com. The last news articles on ITT have been about the Kindle and the fact you can't delete blog posts, for cryin' out loud!
And of course I'm sure El Reg remembers the epic bag of fail that is Ovi.
This is sad, because I wrote a nice bunch of useful (at least to me) apps in Python and pyGTK.
They're still not nearly as bad as Palm though. The hardware actually works, and I've never had an issue with the touchscreen, plus I regularly get 2 weeks between charges with some pretty heavy use.