Part of the issue as I see it, but I am coming over from 30-years of development on the WinTel MSDOS/Windows environment. This means I don't even know the file system well let alone understand the intrinsics of the OS and development language quirks & limitations.

That said, as I have spent more time looking deeper I see a few reasons things are slow. One is there has yet to be any standard library for things such as a database access. So all the developers seem to need to rely on custom indexing routines and file structures. That is like going back a good 10-15 years in development approach needed. BUT, I have run across that there is a new library out for accessing mysql databases as well as some called sqlite or something similar. But as soon as there is some sort of database standard ported to function within the ITOS environment many issues will fall away because things will not need to work from scratch or require the amount of debugging the 'roll your own' database structure needs.

And of course there are issues of the hardware and how good the system is at running background utilities such as a calendar stuff. It's gets to be all about threading, power management (how does the alarm/calendar portion keep running and even wake up the tablet when it's off or do you require users leave the tablet on in sleep mode 24/7 like the PDA's work by design.)

There are a LOT of other factors beyond these few. So when I am critical of developers I also know why these things are difficult. Yet at the same time I am used to being "the boss" and hearing from some coders that things are not possible. Well, they are if you have the right tools. Not all of the tools are there yet for the ITOS devices.

What they should be able to do is have something which at least works fine when the device is powered on. But also the database side is pretty primitive and needs to catchup. Given recent new over on the Maemo Garage site that seems to be happening.

I might be hard on the developers but what I wish they would do is communicate WHY and what the current roadblocks might be instead so simply lashing out when folks are critical of the state of ITOS app development.

I can say in just the last couple months since getting my N800 I have seen a big leap in capability for the developers which can only mean good stuff is not too far behind for us peon users. I do have appreciation for them right now, but at the same time, if they want to help grow the environment taking the path of least resistance and working on just stuff like multi-media apps really can lead to a lot of frustrated regular users who can only see what they want/need is just not there and anytime they ask they get smacked on the nose for even asking.

Obviously there must be more roadblocks then I have found, but I am betting no more then 6-mos for some pretty decent improvements on the PIM kinda app front.

Until then I guess a person could learn to run the maemo version of the linux/unix "cron" utility from the command line (ie xterm) and create our own alarms, at least it might make noise when you need it... But there is a lot of learning to even get there...not something a busy person wants to deal with really.