I've had Palms for a long time - started with a visor, then a Sony Clie, then a T3. I like them, bit dated, but they work. I got a keyboard for the T3, never used it, wife used it for her M505, then M515, she's sad it doesn't work on her TX.

I have a Zaurus 3100, I love it, the clamshell + touchscreen, it's a great linux hackers tool. Have used Cacko, Angstrom/GPE. With Cacko I used both touch screen and keyboard, with Angstrom I mostly used the keyboard because GPE just didn't really work that well! When I tried a Zaurus 6000 I found its small keyboard to be frustrating and a nuisance! For both zauruses, the keyboard was essential because the UIs weren't well designed!

The N800, for me, actually works quite well, it has quite a lot of quirks but you get used to them quickly. The screen layout wastes a lot of valuable pixels, the on-screen menus and the menu button are particularly odd. Some control panel apps are not too well thought out - the network one is particularly bad. However, you can pick up a tablet and quickly make it do stuff, you're not fighting it too much. I don't think it's broken badly, it needs cleaning up, rationalising. Hildon might not be the best, but at least things get a global style.

For nearly three months mid 2007 I used macbookpro with OSX, I liked it, but I found the enforced styles too much, irritating! I didn't like the dock, wanted a trivial start menu, didn't like the animations even though I turned off everythign I could. I now have a Toshiba running linux and a very simple KDE theme (though I did try compiz fusion just to see what the fuss was about, hated it after 5 minutes).

OK, my point? A good UI doesn't get in the way of what you want to do! After the fun of the "bling" in OSX and Vista and KDE, if you're focusses on tasks, you want something that's simple, plain, rational/consistent and tidy!

I came to this thread wondering if I could remove part of the hildon interface to simplify it - save some screen real estate. Didn't mean to rant for so long, sorry.