I love this thread - always a good idea to consolidate the ranting

I got my n800 as a Christmas present from my wife and so far its been the most tech fun Ive had since trying to configure X11 on Slackware 15 odd years ago.

<rant>

I've flashed Os2008 (at least 4 times - corrupt download, wrong version, etc.), locked the n800 in the refrigerator half a dozen times to get it to pair with my phone (might not be a Nokia issue), hacksawed a mini-A usb cable so I can connect flash drives, bought a stereo A2DP bluetooth transmitter so I can hear decent audio, spent 4 hours trying to set up scratchbox on Xubuntu (got it working in the end), bought 2 large SD cards so I had space for movies, tried and failed to get decent video playback in Media Player, installed then reinstalled Media Converter, copied the movies over, recoded them overnight and copied them back again, bought and paired an iGo bluetooth keyboard that I have nowhere to actually use, installed VPNC got it working with wifi but apparently it doesn't work with DUN (yet), rdesktop'd into work to find I couldn't type anything (didnt try the keyboard). I'm currently teetering on booting from MMC and installing Penguin Bait's KDE.

Fun, fun, fun - at least for me but come on what can you actually use this thing for? I see two huge problems with the n800:

1) Form factor - how are you supposed to hold this thing? I try to keep it in my left hand and use the stylus with the right but it seems really difficult to use the Dpad and buttons one handed and its a pain to keep pulling the stylus in and out. Landscape mode sucks - you look like a dork standing in the bus queue with this thing in landscape mode - why no portrait? I like browsing full width as well, but a rotate button would be much more useful that zooming. It doesnt fit in my pocket well and there doesnt seem to be a screen lock so all the applets move around on every journey.

2) Scratchbox + Matchbox - OMG amazing!! I have never seen such a marvelously useless combination of geeky technology. It takes hours to install and gigabytes of disk space, or a huge VM download and either allow vmware to take over your system or use qemu and flaky cut'n paste. Apps can be built from source and because Maemo is debian like it only takes a moderate amount of frustration to get things to compile - woohoo! erm.. well then there is the issue that there really aren't any Linux apps that work out the box with Matchbox or Hildon input and beyond a handful like microb, xournal (still havent got it to install), and maemo mapper and you probably wouldnt want the others anyway. Seriously gigabytes of system scripts, headers, libraries? What are you thinking Nokia? You need a simplified dev environment that runs on the n8x00 and lets people build useful apps. Geez - I get at least Flash is an option now. Processor not powerful enough, not enough RAM for gcc, not enough storage? I dont think so.

</rant>

I'd let it all slide if there was a decent arkanoid or invaders game to leverage landscape mode

Edit: oooo... I forgot to mention the repository fun - but that probably deserves a thread of its own.