"My Nokia Memo Story" -- Randall Arnold

Following the coverage of Sotiris Makrygiannis's departure from Nokia, and the tweets he posted summarising the teams' achievements, Randall Arnold posted his own take on his Maemo/MeeGo journey:

I didn’t know what to say the day that former Nokia colleague John Wigginton laid a small black device on my desk. He grinned as I gasped. I had no prior knowledge of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet then; its existence had been kept a guarded secret for some time. But I was familiar with similar devices since I had been putting together a plan for mobile auditing of our cell phone production. John knew of this, and was leaving our group to take another position. I had the pleasure of being selected as the next factory QA shepherd of this little black marvel.

I had almost given up on my mobile auditing quest, haven run into too many cost and technical roadblocks. But here in my hand was an internet tablet, fueled by open Linux, and I didn’t have to purchase it. Solved?

These posts have had something of an "end of an era" feel to them, which is perhaps why the subsequent news about Jolla was greeted with such enthusiasm.

"The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora" -- Henri Bergius

Henri Bergius has posted his own thoughts, with the advantage of coming after the Jolla announcement: Much has been written about the emerging Post-PC era, about the new possibilities it brings, and the limitations it imposes on developer creativity. [...] For starters it ought to be said that I'm not a newcomer to the mobile Internet. Back in 1998 I was already blogging on an Internet-connected Psion PDA, and by early 2000s we were routinely publishing our travel journals this way. But even after the Psion experiences, Maemo was something special.