I can't believe you guys are still having this discussion.
Rationale sense would (usually) lead most people to get a micro-sim from their telco, I would have assumed. It's not exactly exorbitant.

Would you buy a GT-R and then fill up the tank with your granduncle's homebrewed "high octane" rice wine?

Many possible reasons.

1. Because they spend their days fapping to posts on XDA-forums and want to jump onboard the"cool" laggy Android

2. Because they want to be "cool" iSheep like all their friends

3. Because they believed that idiot named Elop and want to move to the STD-OS known as Windows Phone

4. Because they don't realize that "app-ecosystem" is just a fancy way of saying "lock-in"

5. Because they don't understand the beauty of Debian package management

6. Because they owe loan-sharks money

Just joking, btw .... though number 6 is probably the real reason.

This post has been edited by G-17: Jan 13 2012, 09:59 PM

You probably can, but you'll need to build it from source. The current state of the interface isn't very good. I saw leaked pics of a Samsung implementation and it looked awful, about 3 - 5 generations behind the N9 's Meego Harmattan. At this point in time, it's still good to stick with Maemo-Meego-QT for the N9. If there are any developements on alternative OS like Mer or Nemo, it's probably be the N950 and N9 that get compatibility the earliest, reason being many of those involved in Maemo/Meego-Harmattan are now working on them.

The main hurdle for alternative OS on the N9 is the Swipe-UI interface, since Harmattan is Nokia-proprietary. Someone needs to sort out the licensing for that first. Elop is shit-scared of the N9 (that's why he doesn't market it in the US cos it would definitely kill the Lumia), so he'll definitely give problems with regards to others using the Swipe UI, even if Nokia doesn't want it anymore.

The other problem is the actual hardware. Even if you could install the Harmattan Swipe UI on another handset like the Galaxy Nexus or iPhone 4, the experience would be shit, despite those phones being more powerful. Simple reason is because the Swipe-UI needs a concave screen to work at it's cerebral best. To my knowledge, most phones out there have flat screens. So I wonder who would want to spend the time and effort licensing/porting/developing the Swipe-UI to another OS if there's currently only 1 handset capable of using it to its fullest (or 2, if you include Lumia models) .

Best is to sign-up for the the MerOS mailing list or join their IRC meetings: http://merproject.org/
It's just core framework, but any news will probably come to them first.

This post has been edited by G-17: Jan 14 2012, 06:24 PM

That's the beauty of Linux/FOSS. I mean REAL Linux, btw ... not Android's implementation of Linux in a VM. You get a level of openness and control that makes the hardware run much better than what you think.

Example: My second desktop, and old Pentium Dual Core with 1GB RAM running Debian or OpenBSD boots and opens apps much faster than my neighbour's Core i7 8GB RAM running Win7.

Sure, I have complaints about the N9, no phone is perfect afterall, but what it can achieve with a single-core late 2009 spec processor is simply awesome compared to even modern high-end smartphones. Makes you wonder why smartphones need such crazy specs in the first place.

I'm pretty sure in 2 years time Android phones will be carrying multicore processors and the users will need to carry a separate bottle with a tube attached to their phones for water-cooling.