Yes, I have a 5800 as my primary phone now due to my work on All About Symbian. It's currently the only S60 5th Edition device so we have to use it in order to cover the latest version of Symbian.

It's not really that much like the tablets because it's primarily a phone rather than a computer, but it does show how a computing platform can be used to do a successful consumer product (and Symbian is going open source next year so future Symbian devices may even become as open as the tablets are now).

IMHO the 5800 is an excellent device because Nokia have identified a target audience and gone out of their way to tailor the hardware for that audience:

- The screen is small and narrow enough to use the entire device with one hand, you can operate all its functions with a single thumb. (I haven't touched the stylus at all.)

- The 5800's default standby is built entirely around favourite contacts, including one-touch shortcuts to calls, texts, communication history and that contact's RSS feeds. (You can alter standby to other options if you prefer though.) It's actually very good even as a pure phone, every core function is very easy to access.

- The price is right, it costs literally half of what the iPhone costs, so it's going after people who simply aren't on Apple's (or Nseries') radar. Even sold unlocked the 5800 only costs about 300 dollars, and on contract it's free. It's a text-book example of Nintendo-style targetting of cheaper hardware at a mass market.

- There's an iPhone-style app shop launching next month called Ovi Store, which apparently has "thousands" of registered developers already. That level of interest is only possible because the store is being deployed on devices that people buy in large numbers. Niche products like the tablets can't do that, there just aren't enough potential customers.

I'm not saying maemo needs to copy the 5800 directly, I'm just saying that maemo devices need to be designed for particular functions: phones or media players or netbooks or consoles or... just anything with an established market or a potential market.

Nokia's Symbian and NokiaOS devices are all aimed at someone, they all have a particular look, shape and feel which would suit a particular kind of function or person. None of the maemo tablets do this.

It was right of Nokia to experiment with the tablets, and the success of the iPhone/iPod Touch, Nintendo DS and EEE PC show that Nokia were correctly anticipating something big by focusing on portable touchscreens and mobile computing, but Nokia now needs to move on to the next stage and build a maemo product that ordinary people want to buy.

Asus did it by shrinking a laptop as far as it would reasonably (and cheaply!) go, Nintendo did it by focusing on games, Apple did it with telephony on the iPhone and media on the iPod Touch. Nokia could do those, or they could do something else, but whatever they do they should do it now.

Focus doesn't mean dropping other features, it just means giving people a clear idea of why they would buy it, and shops a clear idea of where they should stock it (remember how much trouble amazon.com and nokia.com had in classifying the tablets?).

Maemo as a platform is excellent, but it is going to waste if the platform itself is the only primary attraction on its hardware.

In short, Nokia needs to give people excuses for buying maemo devices: I need a phone, I need a laptop, I need a music player, I need a console etc.