How does this kill the N800?

The slide-out keyboard is nice, but it's not ergonomically a good mechanism (but, the ergonomically good way to do it makes the device bigger: see the pepper pad series). I prefer something like the micro-laptop with rotating screen form factor (gateway makes a laptop like this, and HTC makes a cell phone like it).

A real camera would be nice, sure. But that's not what I was looking for when I bought an N800.

Real cell phone instead of skype? meh. It would be nice to have real cell phone + non-vendor-specific-SIP phone software + vendor-specific-VOIP-software options (ie. I could pick Skype OR Vonage, etc.). But, ultimately, I didn't buy my N800 to be a phone. I don't plan to _ever_ activate its Skype capability. The main attractive feature, to me, for having real cell capability would be for persistent internet connectivity.


What I wanted was a PDA that I can use for email, ssh, and web browsing ... and do local work on it when I'm away from wireless connectivity. It also had to have bluetooth keyboard capability or a built in physical keyboard. Oh, and I have a STRONG preference for it being *nix based. It was N800 vs iPhone vs iPod-Touch. The keyboard thing is mostly what ruled out the Apple products.

If that device ALSO has those things, great. But that doesn't suddenly make my N800 obsolete.

Further, the next generation of the N800 series, if an on-line mockup is to be believed, will also have a slide-out keyboard. Now if they'd only put a real IMAP client on it (I took for granted that "has IMAP" was good enough ... and it's not. The N800's built in IMAP is basically "POP behavior via IMAP protocol", which is not acceptable.)