Yes it's sucking big time !!!!!!

I'm also finding this incredibly annoying.

Changing Phone to Landscape only does not work very well.

Whichever orientation I change to works for a day or two and then the blank screen / freezing issues recur.

I usually do not have anything running in the background and my N900 is exceptionally stable in other respects.

I had posted a [Request] for an enterprising coder to map Phone Answer to a hard key (camera key or other).

Maybe it's just not possible ?