Try 2006/7 for the Maemophone launch date. WiFi was becoming widespread, and in the Western world, 3G was commonplace already. Saying that Nokia dropped the ball on the Maemo experiment is a huge, massive understatement. The one non-geek think I love about the N900 aside from the multitasking is the concept that the whole system is made by its parts. Everything just comes together so nicely, and it's hard to describe how (notifications and the concept and implementation of "contact cards" being the best examples) Too bad Nokia never gave Maemo the raw hardware horsepower to do amazing stuff. The OMAP3630 in the N9 pales in comparison to the OMAP4430 MP found in modern Android phones. The 256MB RAM and tiny rootfs also were some very annoying limitations (the first causing reboots when there was not enough RAM for quite some time and Maemo is in swap hell and the second overcome by mount -o bind)