Nice analysis by Eldar at the beginning; is this community ready for the attention? --- I have two N97s right beside me right now; hardware on this looks very, very similar. If the build quality of the first one I got, regardless of price, Nokia has a winner and then some. Subsidized, this device will be $399-499 USD. A subsidy making it cheaper than that says that this device will be a huge success; and I think it will, but like the Ford FiveHundred, not initially, only after its seen on the road a bit.
Eldar always writes in a way to make you see the next steps if you read the lines carefully. The RX-71 should be very, very ground breaking. Nokia's CEO made a comment once about netbooks being nothing more than smaller laptops, that Nokia understands the difference between a computer that's mobile and doing mobile computing. I'm very intrigued, and think that the keyboard-shifting model is coming, with Maemo 5.