To be fair, it seems to me that Nokia is clearly targeting the smartphone market with the N900 and Maemo. That's why they shrunk their internet tablet platform to phone size and added a phone.

I assume Nokia intends to sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of this device. Only a tiny fraction will be developers, early adopters, and gadget geeks. The rest will have never heard of the N810 and the like. They will come to the N900 from the perspective of the phone world and shape their expectations accordingly. Nokia knows this.

Further, one of the things that supposed to be good about the phone on the N900 is that it integrates the regular phone functionality with voip services extremely well. Some say better than on any other device. Clearly Nokia in some respects has tried to make the phone component very powerful and not just a side application.

Here's even Nokia itself, on it's Conversations website, saying the N900 "bridges that wilderness between smartphone and compact laptop" (http://conversations.nokia.com/2009/...ew-nokia-n900/). So clearly for Nokia the N900 is not supposed to be a computer with a phone on the side, but rather the sum of the two (and therefore more than both).

So I think the distinction between a computing device with a phone and a smartphone (a term whose meaning no one has ever agreed on anyway) is splitting hairs a bit. Nokia has packaged the N900 in a way to create a certain set of expectations, it seems deliberate to me, and so Nokia is responsible to the market it creates with those expectations. Nokia will after all be marketing the N900 in the phone market and through carriers. It may be the first N series device offered directly by a U.S. carrier in a long time. How much more does Nokia have to do to make people think this is a phone?