I own a Nokia N800, the immediate predecessor (and extremely similar to) the N900. And I can tell you exactly why it failed. Because the interface was really

I own a Nokia N800, the immediate predecessor (and extremely similar to) the N900. And I can tell you exactly why it failed. Because the interface was really terrible. It was so bad I even made an article about it here: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/ https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/ I am a former Newton developer. The Newton had its failings in many respects of course, but its interface was elegant, consistent, and of very high quality. Applications all worked the same way, and the Newton tried very hard to make an interface designed for the stylus. The Nokia series was awful: its applications felt very much like QT X11 apps crammed into a PDA screen, because that's exactly what they were. Almost no thought was given to how people interact with tablets. Compared the the iPhone and Android, Maemo (the N800/900 subsystem) was awful. I think this is the classic X11 failing: the core of a good GUI is consistency and interconnectivity, and to achieve this good GUIs absolutely require a hegemon, some Evil Person who Forces Everyone to To It This Way. Otherwise it's just herding 1000 cat developers who come up with all sorts of awful interface designs because nobody is in charge. The iPhone and Android have both had hegemons (Apple and Google, in their different ways, forcing design requirements on developers). Not only did Nokia not succeed as a hegemon, they drank the Linux Kool-Aid in thinking that you didn't need one. And boy did it show. Also, terrible battery life.