I dropped a comment of my own on the Canola site, and was planning to use it for this usefull thread. However your contribution covers it all, including the other stuff like UKMP. So I'll keep it short.

There was (26/12/2007) no problem installing Canola from the Canola site. Very smooth and helpful site ! Found it using Google. My earlier uploads from Maemo and the N800 OS2008 Application Manager failed.

Very sleek Canola UI. My kids (> 28, sorry) love it: "now it's some Thing!" The Photo Views are absolutely great. One star more than Quiver ! (Which is already an excellent and excellent tool and providing more freedom in functionality / choices).

Yet for Audio I use the standard mediaplayer on my N800 OS 2008. Canola finds less wma / mp3 files on my cards than my mediaplayer and mixes up titles, genres, albums etc. Don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but it is confusing. I like the fact they included the possibility for Pod- and Vodcasts. I'm sure this all will improve in the coming weeks. It’s still a Beta. And the nice thing of Canola is that it blingblings. And that is needed in Commerce. Sex sells.

However the OS2008 standard Media Player does all I want it to do and has all the functionality required. Also the information (titles, albums etc). are well and accurate displayed. The OS2008 version is better then the old one. Also looks better -good enough for me.
Perhaps it needs a nicer name to cope with the strange habits in this Tablet world environment (LiIgnhlrt 6XXX or something ).

But, next, I'll take a look at he MediaBox as mentioned by Mara

Thanks for the useful comments,

Abel.