Nokia spectaculary blew its own foot with deprecating Maemo after only a few months - either the stupidest move in history or result of internal power struggles - and force-marrying it with Intel's Moblin (itself a decent mobile OS) to create unholy mess that was Meego.
The book (btw awesome find, gonna read it at the first chance I get!) agrees with my recollection of the events:
> The operating system was named Maemo. As soon as it was permitted to be fitted on a phone, that first Maemo smartphone was a reasonable success. It attracted a community of open source developers who created Maemo apps. With 12,000 members, this was the largest mobile developer community in the world. Then Nokia did something remarkable. It partnered with the chip manufacturer Intel, and the two companies renamed Maemo to MeeGo.
Consider Maemo was Debian-based, using GTK, and Moblin was RedHat-based, using QT. It not only meant Nokia had to rewrite its proprietary UI and repackage everything, it also threw all the thriving dev community under the bus.
this is half-correct. Maemo->Meego did shift from GTK to QT, but they kept the Debian packaging on the N9 (the only device to ship with Meego)
I never had a N900, but I have a similar memory of fixing a work problem while traveling in the late 90's. I used a terminal on a Palm Pilot over a dial-up modem, typing into a shell using the "graffiti" handwriting. It was...painful and triumphant all at once :)
At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".
Curious why you bought it instead of the iPhone.
Nokia used to have internal shows to get employees feedback for future products, Maemo not having a radio modem was a common remark, naturally they couldn't add it due to Symbian.
Also think that Elop gets more blame than he deserves, as many see his connection to Microsoft and not the bonus from Nokia's own management board.
NetAct versus other networking products, also suffered from the same culture issues, by the way.
Not much else I can talk openly about it.
[0] Btw, I'm absolutely not dissing this: I have my own fetish - something of a thing for old synths, particularly those of the early-ish digital era in the 80s that are still fairly affordable, and recently bought a Yamaha RX5 drum machine... from Australia. It wasn't _that_ expensive, but it's a similar level of expenditure. I love old analogue synths too: I just can't afford them and, with these, because they're a bit more sexy and fashionable than the digital options, you can often pick up much less expensive modern day reproductions and homages.
You're right, but you're going to upset a whole bunch of people who think that what people wanted was Debian on a phone, and are uninterested in hearing the last 10 years of market evidence to the contrary.
The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight.
In comparison, the N900 I have sitting in the bottom of a storage box someplace was a major disappointment--Maemo never came close to delivering half the functionality I had in a 9500, even though the design principles were pretty advanced for that time.
(I strongly recommend reading "Operation Elop" for an idea of what that later stage in Nokia's life was like, and why Maemo tanked: https://asokan.org/operation-elop)
But the 9000 series was definitely something I wish we had today in some usable, non-niche form.