Hi tokyo :

The ipod touch is a solid multimedia dude. There's actually a couple of things we (from Canola team) would like to be able to have, but at the same time those are the biggest drawbacks from the iDevices : liberty to place your media.

Photos always go trhough a "transconding" : this is great because it makes sure the UI will be always " snappy " but you have a dithered (low quality) photo no matter how good is your camera.

Videos always go through filtering : only the specific h264 formats will go into and this is quite boring as you will have to convert almost any internet video nowdays : /

And the same for music and so on.

in the end this comes to a point I'm writing a small article about :

" Balancing freedom and User experience" : how to deal in the opensource based device world with the needs of highly experienced users x the need of having a responsive UI and a concise user experience across multiple platforms in not so powered devices.

But I need to agree with you in some points: Maemo could be way better by now. It's something not easy to understand why it is still so " not-ready " for prime time : /

Marcelo