Maemo vs. Android

To me the arguments made in the article sounds like <i>"Maemo is more like _real_ Linux than Android, and therefore it will win"</i>.<p>I don't see much support for that in the marketplace for consumer and non-IT department mandated products. The overall user experience is way more important than anything else, even backwards compatibility, i.e. compare Windows Mobile with iPhone.<p>The competitor who will really square it off with the iPhone in the future will have to be really good at the integrated user experience IMHO.<p>I talked to some Maemo marketing guys at FOSS.in in Bangalore the other day and their key message was that "You can run multiple applications at the same time. You don't have to shut down one application to be able to run another, like on an iPhone."<p>But the handset they were showing (they called it a handheld computer, not a smartphone) was clumsy and unattractive. They were not even showing them turned on, so I couldn't really judge the user experience, but if you don't want to show it I don't believe it is a strong selling point.<p>The Android team seems to concentrate more on the user experience, something which I haven't seen the Nokia teams really do yet, so I think Android is better placed, for now.

The poster seems to be confused about what he is trying to argue. Is he talking about technical merits or which will sell more? Even as a fan of Maemo there is no doubt in my mind that there will always be more Android phones on the market than Maemo phones. Also if you're intention is to sell apps and make money you're best bet of the two is Android.<p>If writing phone apps was my day job I'd easily choose Android over maemo any day of the week. As a geek programming simply for my own enjoyment the Maemo platform is far more enticing, if for no other reason than the fact that I get to use tools like Qt4, C, python, and all the libraries available for Linux. The idea of having basically a slightly stripped down Debian on my phone is just really cool. Plus the new Maemo 5 seems to finally be a truly usable environment running on some nice hardware.

My take on it:<p>The multitude of useful apps that are already on the market and can be easily ported for maemo makes it a <i>very</i> strong player.<p>I know I'm not mainstream market, not even close, but KeePassX, Vim, Mplayer, VLC, Xmms, Abiword. Those are valuable open source projects that are already there for the maemo.

Maemo 5 seems great. Nokia though really seems to lack a coherent strategy and should have taken Maemo-based phones to market much earlier.