David Rivas, Nokia’s vice president for devices R&D, told Reuters that Nokia plans to skip operator tailoring for Linux Maemo phones like the upcoming Nokia N900. Analysts say Nokia cannot afford to do this and risks refusal of the carriers to offer the device.

“Very clearly Apple, Android … are a whole lot less about providing customization to the operators and a whole lot more about providing a really cool, compelling value proposition to the end-consumer,” David Rivas, Nokia’s vice president for devices R&D, told Reuters.

“We have an opportunity, that we are going to take advantage of, with Maemo platform to play the game a little bit more along those lines than with Symbian lines,” Rivas said.

I don’t think this affects high-end consumers like me especially in the United States. I’ve never bought anything from the carrier because the Nokia phones I wanted weren’t sold by my carrier. I’ve always purchased unlocked phones, either from the the Nokia flagship stores or Amazon. However, I’m not the typical consumer.

AT&T recently sold the Nokia E71x, which was a good sign of things to come, but it had customizations that restricted certain features while also forcing people to pay a higher data plan than unlocked Nokia E71 users. The customizations may be perfectly fine to most new consumers, but certainly not those used to the freedom with unlocked phones.

Update. Official Nokia Conversations site says that this is incorrect and there are many customization points for operators.

This week, there have been a number of speculative stories suggesting that Nokia will not allow for operator customization of Maemo devices. Seems a few people are getting ahead of themselves. As we have said over the past couple of weeks, our plan with Maemo is to focus on the consumer experience – integrating applications and services from Nokia, our broad community of developers and publishers and, of course, from our operator customers. While we have not announced immediate plans to offer an operator variant for the N900, there are many customization points for operators on the N900. It would be absolutely incorrect to assume that we will not offer operators the ability to tailor future Maemo devices to suit their needs.