I think Nokia is pressing ahead with new HW versions and also new SW updates without ever fixing the existing ones. In contrast, my trusty Psion 5MX is still using the same OS that it came with and it has probably only crashed twice in 5 years! That's with putting in new batteries every couple months, putting it standby in mode when I'm not using it, waking it up every now and then to do something. I never turn it OFF, even when swapping batteries - it has a backup battery. The OS is rock solid and gracefully handles boundary conditions (low RAM, low battery.)

For a device like the N800 with a limited number of HW drivers, one would imagine it would be rock solid. For example Apple doesn't have to worry about supporting every piece of HW out there - they just support what they have in their machine. Similarly Nokia ought to make sure that their SW fully supports their HW. I think these crashes are completely unacceptable! And the N800 is not some stripped down machine any more, it has plenty of RAM and 'disk' space, and with my 128MB swap file there's no excuse for running out of memory.

My old Psion has "just" 16MB of RAM and "only" 32MB of flash and it runs just fine. Granted, I can't surf the web on it, but it's almost impossible to make it crash even though it's HW resources are very limited. That's because the SW has been very well designed and debugged even before it was shipped.