Very flawed statistics. The only explanation I see for that growth is if Nokia simply lowered bracket of what they consider to be "smartphone" to improve numbers for their shareholders, otherwise - on real world smartphone market - Nokia is pretty much dead.
My guess is it's accurate, you have to remember that in the developing world Nokia are a MASSIVE brand-name. I mean, sure, they're big over here, but in places like Nigeria "Nokia" is a genericised trademark, it basically MEANS "mobile phone" (It might've been Kenya rather than Nigeria, it's been around a year since I read this so I don't remember, but it was from Time Magazine so it's a reliable source), and in places like India they part-own large bits of the network, so you can imagine it'd be easy to get providers to push their phones. (Nokia-Siemens Networks sell equipment to mobile operators everywhere, the UK included, but in some countries they actually have a stake in their clients' networks) TBH I don't think any other smartphone manufacturer with the exception of Samsung even has the manufacturing capacity to service the vast increasing demand for them in the developing world, so I don't doubt that those stats are true. We're not talking about their top-tier flagship phones, but the "mainstream" smartphones of course.
The thing is - smartphone user that requires hackable device is a niche within niche of a niche market. The percentage of users who would pay £500, £600 then wait 6 months for landscape keyboard, because everyone was working on.. I don't know - controlling playstation from shell on the screen, or whatever they were doing with Maemo, is almost as insane and loss making as previous Nokia flops - their satellite receivers come to mind. They literally slid from class leader to slowest kid in school, in half a decade. It's painful to watch.
No, you're totally right, Maemo development was stupidly slow and it's unacceptable that many of the missing features on the N900 still aren't fixed a year on! My guess is they had pulled everyone apart from 2 coders off it to get them working on Maemo 6 even before the platform was abandoned. And when that happened so many of their supporters abandoned them feeling bitter and betrayed (not just consumers but also contributors to the Maemo project and app makers). The whole thing was a fiasco. It was a difficult decision and I think they made the right one, but they definitely didn't implement it properly: they took a good long time to clarify that Meego is essentailly Maemo 6, that it wasn't a total platform abandonment, and they flip-flopped so many times on whether Meego would run on the N900 before finally settling on yes!
Still, they do have one ace up their sleeve: if Intel somehow manages to pull a chip that can successfully compete with ARM CPUs on smartphones, Meego will probably be the best OS to run them on. There's an x86 version of Android out there somewhere, but I have no idea how well it runs or whether apps written for the ARM version will work on it natively. Still, I doubt Intel's really working on anything that small, x86 support is more likely to a thing for the tablet market.
