As far as I know, Nokia never marketed this as a smartphone anywhere, but I just realised yesterday that some of the retailers do, sadly.

Amazon.com at least calls it a "Nokia N900 Unlocked Phone/Mobile Computer", but Amazon.de claims it is a "Nokia N900 Smartphone". BAD marketing strategy (which clearly shows in the rapidly sinking price ), but this time it's not even Nokia's fault.

Mark this day in your calendars, Gentleman...

(Disclaimer: Don't take this the wrong way - I know this may sound harsh at times, but it's not meant to be.)

What I'm about to say applies to most of your issues, but this is the one that was most prominent.

You've been repeatedly told that this is not a smartphone, but rather a mobile computer, and you claimed to already have realised that. But you still seem to lack the deeper meaning of this fact.

Boot a Windows PC. Open ANY application. Open any OTHER application. Compare their icons.

Computer programs simply are not uniform, sometimes not even when they're from the same company. They don't have to be, as long as their controls don't stray too far from what the average user is used to. And neither do the programs in your mobile computer have to be uniform in order to be useful.

Though, unlike with most PC icons, with Maemo at least you have a good chance of "fixing" this "problem" yourself. Many applications on the Maemo store icons as plain graphic files in /usr/share/icons, so if their non-uniformity peeves you that much, you have the choice of overwriting them with any icon set you choose.

(Doesn't work with all applications, as some use library files, but I think the vanilla Nokia ones work that way.)

So, really - you'll come to enjoy your N900 much more if you don't compare it to the smartphones (who force you to use THEIR standard phone/mail/calendar applications, so they HAVE to be more polished), but rather compare it to your PC (where you have free choice to simply sack that sub-par Win7 eMail application in favour of installing any of the hundreds of alternatives out there).