So having (hopefully) addressed some specifics... here are my thoughts:

Wow!!

And that is not really for the device - it's for the people!

I've worked for a major UK telco for a while and unless you've been in a similar position it really is hard to understand how much effort is clearly going into being open with Maemo... and when you meet these people in person... that impression just gets stronger and stronger.

However... the exclamation also applies to the device

My impressions... kinda replaying the timeline of my experience....

It's solid but more manageable than the N800. The plastic casing is a bit lumpy and bumpy and you can't really say how smooth it will be to handle. A black theme is going to look very cool (but someone commented that the SDK theme is not going to be on the product).

The screen feel is smooth and precise. The UI is different and I spent many many seconds figuring it out

I was impressed with the responsiveness (though I expected no less) and the sharpness of the image.

The "click outside the box" thing is different but works well on the device... (later I thought it could be annoying if developers start nesting things too deeply). It is really nice to see too; the blurring of the background is very cool and *very* effective as a usability hint. The whole gui experience was great.

There was no other application SW installed on mine (#7) but IIRC the Application Manager had much improved categories

It has a stylus... small but present... so that's good. I don't recall actually using it though.

There's a camera on the front.... and another on the back and flash leds?
I tried to look inside and count the pixels but gave up at 2 million

No stand obvious though... but the final case may provide that.

Keyboard.... as I posted, the keyboard is great. I typed happily on it and the soft keys on the x-terminal worked well. Shame about the tab but I can see the sense to omit that from the hard keys.

At this point (having spent a while moving around the UI) I actually noticed the screen size as I launched xterm. It felt a bit small for hacking in; I think that's because the font was big (pixels) and it reminded me of an N800 xterm with a virtual keyboard. Having thought about it a bit more I did a little test and when I held the N800 at a 'normal' distance (about 50cm) I found that holding the new device a few cm closer (45cm... not exactly tip of your nose!) gave the same perceived screen size... I reckon this is why it worked.

It was odd though ... I had to lie it on top of my N800 to convince myself the screen was actually smaller and it still didn't compute. Having used it I personally do not think the screen size is an issue.

OK.... later on I had the chance to get the Mer version (arm 5) of Qt running on it and that worked well (although I can reveal that you run out of space on the flash when you install big chunks of Ubuntu).

There are some bugs when you rotate the screen (nb there was no automatic accelerometer to RandR link in the prototype) and the scroll and redraw speed was really bad... apparently that has fixed but the demo version didn't have it.

My Mer/Qt application ran nicely on it, looked really good and "just worked".

I note that the discussions around 3D suggested to me there was some internal frustration with the hardware limitations and they'd like to do more; I don't know if this relates to the driver or the HW.

There was no opportunity to look at the functionality of the GPS or camera(s).

Overall I had very little to want to change... I think the only bug I'm going to file is that when I lie it on the table with the keyboard open then I want the screen to wake up when I pick it up