One of my favorite phones along with the N95. The overall design of the whole product is pure genius in my opinion. Sad what happened to it. I own two of them, and use the N9 from time to time when I feel nostalgic.
I think they could have kept working on it on the side, and released a phone every 1-2 years. Even with the minimal size MeeGo team at Nokia, they released 3 major updates.
http://neo900.org/ is costing me a fortune. Nokia really did something right smoothly moving their pre-iPhone mini-tablets forward into the new all-screen smartphone world. Too bad they didn't keep it going.
Thank god none of you are in charge. Just kidding or am I?
Elop played the game straight forward. Forking is a half baked option and when you are leveraging your company, forking is not an option. You need full scale OS support and that means, Nokia could have either gone with MS or Google. Google apparently refused to make space for Nokia's competing service suite (Read-Business Week) and as such, the option was only MS. I know the hate is strong for MS in this community but it's way too illogical to think one man alone could have played his tactics and strategies to influence Nokia to switch to a MS OS for his career progression.
Meego was ruled out as an option as well. A tech-pretty thing may not always work out. WebOS taught us that lesson. So conspiracy theories are pretty meaningless.
I think they could have kept working on it on the side, and released a phone every 1-2 years. Even with the minimal size MeeGo team at Nokia, they released 3 major updates.