To be honest, if the E71 were running Linux and as open and had a development community, I would have bought an E71. It's a lot cheaper after all, and it's got a good enough screen and keyboard and connectivity for most things, including xterm ;-)

But it's not. For me the real reason for buying an N900 is the Linux, the community, and the ability to write my own apps for personal use.

All this talk of no portrait mode is disappointing. At the least, a web browser is more usable in portrait mode for many things like long articles and things that resemble lists - such as forums like this one! (If you have good enough eyesight to set the text very small, anyway).

But not disappointing enough to put me off buying one. How hard can it be to hack the browser, or for that matter, the framebuffer, into a preferred shape :-)