So according to what everybody is saying, Nokia is going to start using the Maemo operating system + SDK in their high-end smartphones. This is good news. Symbian is basically a smoking pile of junk. It’s too old, and too crap, to be fixed. Toss it out the window and good riddance.

I realize this won’t happen overnight, but the sooner we can get a more modern, well-documented, programmer-usable SDK available for Nokia phones the better. Maemo looks good at first blush. You develop on Linux instead of horrible, horrible windows, which is good and means that a proper SDK for Mac is probably possible. You use Qt which is apparently pretty good. So, good news all around.

Nokia needs to fix a lot of other things to keep their game going in the smartphone market. They need to stop messing around with resistive touch screens for one thing. But without a great OS they can’t make anything else happen. So, I hope that they follow this up with more symbian abandonment and more alternative awesomeness.

UPDATE: And here it is (video of N900).