Thanks for the replies. I'm very glad to hear about the graphing/stats analysis abilities; working in the humanities I'm not too up to speed on those but will want to include them in the proposal as potential uses (and maybe play with them myself for my economics seminar this quarter).

@laughing man -- I've been trying to figure out the best way to sync my n900 with my dropbox -- so do you bring your usb cord to plug it into university computers (it works fine for that without admin privileges)? then rsync when you get back home, or over some sort of ftp/ssh?

I also had never thought of using it as a presentation remote, but that seems like a great use. Does anyone have experience running presentations directly from the device? What resolution does it put out?

If this could be done, this could easily be a great all-in-one conference/symposium tool, replacing a 1) laptop for running/editing presentations 2) video and sound recorder 3) remote 4) hmm gps so you don't get lost on the way 5) digital camera for taking to archives, documenting trips, etc

I don't know hardly a thing about GIS, but I wonder if a portable GPS unit has some valid academic uses...

One big thing for my research that is still missing is Zotero (an open-source bibliography/note-taking add on for Firefox). There's some talk of porting it to Fennec, but I'm not certain when that will be done. Do standard firefox add ons work on IceWeasel under Easy Debian?