To put it shortly: Nokia is most likely to be a realist with US market; no matter what they would do with the device to tweak it for US market (primarily to get accepted by operators, secondarily the consumers), it's going to be comparably niche market for this device, when you compare it with the global market conditions. Maybe the wind changes for the following model - but for now, it's just realism not to expect too much from US.

Smartphones or not, Nokia as well as almost all other phone companies can live without twisted and depressing US market, but there are specific manufacturers that are deadly dependent on it. I would be much more concerned of Nokia maintaining good market share and profit portfolio in rest of the markets, and for Apple, keeping US market receptive enough to maintain their sales, especially since their entry to China has been disappointing to say the least. You have to remember that there are operators like China Telecom that have about twice the amount of customers of whole US market...

Apple is at real risk when exclusivity agreements with operators disappear, unless they're able to woo them in those again with new devices, which doesn't actually seem like a bright prospect. Building on continuous lower-segment profits of a global scale Nokia is much less in short-term risk.

I would say comparison isn't so clear-cut... Maemo 5 is essentially fresh-new platform. Even if S60 (with Java and native apps) is pain to develop, it shines in the regard of applications available for it (unless you're quite a nerd). Buying N900 now is either a strong bet for the hardware and software platforms in the future, or sheer ignorance of the situation.

Well. I'm betting on the platform, but that's probably because I know how to hack things better on the device, and that I can do it. So, I'm outside 99.99% phone buyer demographic. At the same time, I feel a bit sorry for those people that are not exactly latest-gadget collectors but compare the hardware specs, and then select N900 based on that, and the price, unless they pretty much stick to using it as a phone with a web browser.

File system sharing (Windows shares, UNIX NFS and similar) are one thing storage device sharing at the lower level (mostly iSCSI these days, if you want to use standard networking) are another. I suspect the solution may well involve iSCSI. None of this is really new.

But there's third thing, and that's the capability to boot from the network. This capability has been around for like two decades on UNIX workstations, and around one decade even on well-equipped networked PCs, not limited to servers.

In PC world, de facto standard in this segment is Preboot Execution Environment, or PXE. When a machine is configured to attempt booting from the network, it attempts to acquire IP address and boot configuration information from a DHCP server. After this, it loads specified boot loader from a TFTP server. This is pretty much like any boot loader loading from the disk, but in this case, the boot loader has also an vendor-independent interface to the network through PXE interface. Whatever the boot loader does after this depends really on boot loader writers' imagination. All of this is very useful when you understand it properly; for instance, I have a system that reinstalls 80 Unix desktop machines from scratch with one short command.

What remains to be seen is if Apple has adopted PXE, or brewed its own "standard" for this purpose.

Call me cynical, but I think Apple has performed a huge spin once again. Apple is good at integration - software and hardware, devices and content, and it's likely to be the case here too - but I really think only true Apple Believers or completely technically illiterate can avoid seeing glaring problems. One may well be practical battery life as a phone. Second, much worse, is user experience the touchscreen user interface can provide. Third is price. And the list goes on.

The Mac faithful are eager to queue for this device, but I doubt if Apple has some magic juice that makes it so special... any major phone manufacturer could probably create something equally good, it's just that they would put their brand image at stake, and they have probably figured out that they'd take a bad hit as their average customers aren't blindly faithful (and forgiving), but actually much more pragmatic folks. Ones that care like things if you can make a phone call with one hand, with gloves.

Anything beats phone names like Fukr and Wnkr. It's hard to pick model numbers that would provoke hate and disgust - but it's quite trivial with words. And words are *not* universal.

Well, place names like Helsinki would do quite well, but it's more likely they go the idiotic Motorola way.

Phillip: If I recall correctly, only opened european flagship store in Moscow. They're opening one in Helsinki this Saturday, and sure there are some more to come.