Maemo wasn't the problem, and in fact N900 had a dedicated cult following for years after. Nokia spectaculary blew its own foot with deprecating Maemo after on

Maemo wasn't the problem, and in fact N900 had a dedicated cult following for years after. 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.