I am a bit late to this thread (and I haven't read it all yet), so apologies if the below has already been covered, but just wanted to add my thoughts on the idea of a portrait desktop.


If there is going to be a Portrait desktop, I suspect the best way to implement it would NOT be to rotate the existing landscape desktop (given all the problems you have highlighted above), but rather to have a completely separate Portrait Desktop - ie a 5th Desktop that the user can configure with its own Portrait Wallpaper and set of widgets, located as the user wants in Portrait mode.

This desktop would only be visible when the device is held in Portrait Orientation.

Perhaps we would then need a 6th, 7th & 8th desktop so we could have 4 Panoramic Portrait desktops.

If the user is looking at the "5th" Portrait Desktop and then switches to holding the device Landscape, then the desktop switches to the last used Landscape Desktop.


EDIT: Ok, so I have now read the entire thread and it seems that Elimoon8 hit on the same idea (see here), so my post is another vote for a separate set of Portrait Desktops as the solution to how do your rotate the landscape desktop and deal with the freely placed widgets.