Yes. Well. The N97 is a fine product and S60 5.0 is a fine piece of software, I don't want to say that. But ... um, lets say that perhaps there are even better solutions to this problem.

I'm all for enabling methods for the community to try out Home in portrait and trying to find clever solutions for the problems in hand.

I'm not all for shipping by default "to normal customers" with non-optimal solutions. In those cases, from my perspective, no feature at all is a better solution than a poorly thought out and implemented feature.

The hooks to detect portrait mode are there, as seen in Call app and in Conboy. But enabling it would basically require enabling portrait in the Dashboard view, because they are so integrally linked.

And that's a whole other can of worms: what would the Dashboard show in portrait mode, if the user came to Dashboard from landscape mode and then turns the device: do we ask each application to re-render itself into portrait. What do those applications do that cannot re-render themselves. Are there portrait and landscape thumbnails there at the same time. Or vice versa, if the user comes to Dashboard from portrait view. Do portrait applications still have a landscape app shaped thumbnail. Are the thumbnail contents rotated 90 degrees around. Do the users get surprised if the thumbnail icon they press in the Dashboard does not elegantly zoom into the full screen view (since the Dashboard would then have the thumbnail of the incorrect orientation [many apps look different in portrait and landscape] etc.).