The iPhone does very much shine the light on the N800, and boy is it a deer caught in the headlights. Looking at the amateurish, butt-ugly Hildon with its super-inconsistent UI, arrows, font use etc, not to mention the slowness and apparently hard-coded everything (why is it impossible to do such a basic thing as rotate the screen... forget about rotating it automatically, you can't even do it with a button press?) and then the slowness... (less so on the N800, but it's still crud.)

Assuming those demo videos and Steve Jobs demos etc aren't rigged, and everything actually flows and looks that nice, and is as super-consistent and well thought out navigation-wise... well then hopefully other manufacturers will wake up and smell the coffee.

Nokia is guilty of making slow and nasty UI's for a long time now. The Symbian "normal" phones are unacceptably slow, it sometimes takes second just to draw a few frickin icons etc, and you go to do something and hit a button, then wait and when nothing happens you push again - and then suddenly both keypresses register.

Since when is that ok? I mean this is 2007 for heavens sake, you'd think it was possible to design slick, fast and seamlessly good looking interfaces, so kudos to Apple for finally getting us moving in that direction.

The N800 is only good for one reason... no, well, two - the screen resolution and Opera. The rest, with Hildon and all that other crud, sucks but Opera carries the entire device. Even that is getting shaky because Nokia won't get that upgraded to version 9, and version 8 of Opera while great just isn't compatible enough with the latest ajaxified web pages.

Polish. That's essentially the thing with (what I've seen so far of) the iPhone. They didn't just slap something together like Nokia did and get it done in a half-assed way, they spent years creating something that is a thing of beauty - and I'm talking more about the software/ui than the hardware, which is also better looking than Nokias...

I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on an iPhone.