Since the announcement that Nokia is merging Maemo with Moblin into MeeGo, many of the Nokia N900 owners asked if it will be possible to run MeeGo on their Nokia N900 devices. Also with the Maemo 6 release scheduled for sometime this year, the same question is raised here but this time will Nokia provide an upgrade from Maemo 5 to Maemo 6 for the N900. Also the question about the reverse and cross platform compatibility of the applications is a interesting one, but I will not discuss it here in details.

There are two possible outcomes for this, the first and I must say the best for many, if not all of the users is that Nokia will be bringing the Maemo 6 or MeeGo to the Nokia N900 via official firmware updates. The second one it that MeeGo and Maemo 6 will not be released for the N900, but don't  get disappointed just yet.

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The thing I personally like about the N900 is that it is NOT a cellphone or a smartphone from where I am standing. Instead, it is more like a mobile computer or even more like a super small netbook. So what does this mean in relation to Maemo 6 and MeeGo. A lot of my friends bough laptops with Vista on them and removed it in order to install a better operating system. Just like their laptops the N900 is just a piece of hardware with a CPU and all the things that build a computer. So let's say that Nokia just forgets about updating the firmware for the N900, what do you do? You throw your Nokia N900 in the garbage or store it never to be used again... well NO... at least I will not.

If you had a laptop OS change experience you know that the drivers are the biggest problem. Well it is the same here. If Nokia provides the drivers for the hardware, the community will build Maemo 6 and MeeGo for the N900 even if the drivers are not open source. But let's say Nokia is not feeling so good about providing drivers for the N900 as a worse case scenario. The Linux community has been creating drivers for a long time, so the problem is not a new one or even unsolvable.

As far as the apps go, since both Maemo 5 and Maemo 6 are Qt enabled, apps can be provided with little or less modifications. And to be honest after seeing the Harmattan UI framework on my Nokia N900 I don't think that reverse comparability is a problem.

So what is the conclusion from this, is there going to be Maemo 6 or MeeGo for Nokia N900. To be honest I don't have a slightest idea. But I am sure that whatever happens an upgrade will be possible because many people stopped seeing the Nokia N900 as a smartphone relying on Nokia's firmware updates.

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Comments: Maemo 6 / MeeGo on Nokia N900

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