[kerpele]

Not sure where your information that n8 was supposed to run Meego comes from, but I remember working with the Nokia s60 team already early 2009 and they were using n8 protos at the time. It’s definitely possible that there were two parallel projects though.

On the other hand, Maemo, the predecessor to Meego, required a pen-like pointer to comfortable use at the time as the UI elements were designed to be small. Only after they completely overhauled the UI (and renamed the Linux based OS Meego) it could have worked on the N8.

[jillesvangurp]

That would have been around the time when they should have launched a successor to the N800, which launched in 2007. As I recall, the n8 was originally designed to be that.

Meego/maemo had several UI redesigns. The issue was that Nokia just kept ripping it apart instead of just fixing it. The reason for the pen was resistive screens. Bigger buttons would have been an OK solution. The later n900 had the same issue. Ultimately, they bought QT to fix Symbian and then made the Meego team switch to that. They wasted years on the UI. Jolla emerged out of the ashes of that and is still around. Samsung's Bada is another descendant.