Thanks for dropping in, Eugenia. Welcome aboard! Your article didn't make it clear whether you have a N8x0, or just had one for the review... Should we expect to see more of you around here?

FWIW, I read some of your reviews suggesting Linux was not ready for the desktop, and I found them highly annoying. Nothing specific to your reviews that I remember, just the whole "ready for the desktop" thing has never seemed important to me. And I get annoyed when people go on and on about things that seem unimportant.

This review seemed fair to me; one point of clarification, though:
You won't get to see it until next time you reflash, of course, but OS2008 included the ability to back up the list of packages installed via package manager, so when you install OS2009 (or reflash OS2008) the restore will get your apps. And the next version is slated to have updating w/o reflashing. Upgrading to any later versions will be done (as I understand it) through package manager.

Regarding the main topic flaring up here, I take a middle-of-the-road position on compatibility breaking. (Anyone really like the x86 architecture? Anyone?) Sometimes compatibility breaking is necessary; old APIs have to die at some point, and any old apps that depend on them should be statically linked or reworked to new versions. But it seems that multiple versions of system libraries are a big help, just like on PCs. If old libraries from the last OS or two were available (not installed by default, but could be installed to satisfy dependencies), that would ease a lot of the "upgrading shock" to the new OS before apps are ported. The installation of extra libraries might pose something of a geek barrier, but that's not entirely bad; it encourages recompiling apps for the new versions to reduce newb queries.

And I agree with your price conclusion; I'm not prepared to say that price is unreasonable (they are selling them, after all) but it's not a price I can justify, so I bought an N800 (a week before the N810 was officially announced). I might have waited a month or so if the N810 could have been expected to sell for $300, but it was plainly going to cost more than that.