To the OP:
I won't be sad to see you go. Every post you've had on here has been negative, ill-informed, and cynical to the point of being poisonous. You've done absolutely nothing I can see to try to help or support the community in the months I've been here, other then whine and moan about your perceived shortcomings of the N900. Meanwhile others have taken the more positive route of trying to make things work that by all rights shouldn't (like making iDrive work, which it does now, btw.)

Your negativity won't be missed. In fact, it's absence will probably be celebrated. Have fun whining in another forum about your new device when it also doesn't sync with Exchange and/or your iDrive! And yes, I promise to turn the lights out as the last one leaving, if you promise to try to take your other negative-Nancy "friends" with you to whatever forum you go trolling to next... Speaking of....

A forum, for, about, and composed of people who want to develop for and exchange information about a specific device line is biased toward that device line?! NO WAY!

What planet do you live on that that's not the case? Have you tried talking smack against the iPhone in an iPhone forum? Oh, wait, you can't because they'll just ban you and delete your comments...

Yes, most people here like the N900 (or some previous NX00 model), and most own one. If they don't like it, or don't own one, they'd have no reason to be here! This is not Engadget, or some generic talk forum about phones! It's a very specific forum about a particular line of devices. And when bobble-heads like you (and the OP) show up and start randomly criticizing the latest device for not being able to cause the second coming, why are you surprised to find hostility?

Yes, and I can't get my Zune to sync with the iDrive either! It's like the iDrive is a proprietary standard, made for one particular set of devices from a single manufacturer, or something. (I can't get my Epson laptop to sync with my iDrive either... Why don't they supply a cable for that device?) I can't get my iPod to sync with my preferred RSS reader either, but every other MP3 player (and my N900) can sync with it just fine. Should I chuck my iPod? Is it totally useless?

...buy a £10 bluetooth headset with an answer button? How hard is that? I have a little Morotola 500 earpiece in my car, pre-linked to the N900, normally turned off. If my N900 rings while I'm in the car, I put the earpiece on (one handed, takes .5 seconds without looking away from the road) and press the button to turn it on. One second later, it's connected and auto-answers the call. It work's just fine, almost like it's designed to work with most generic phones, not using a proprietary interface from a competing phone company!

This from a man whos so hung up on his iRadio that he can't figure out to buy a cheep bluetooth headset for his car? I love how you make assumptions about people. All I've had to do to "hack" my N900 has been mainly config editing and minor scripting, because it works out of the box for 98% of what I do with it. That doesn't mean I'm not capable of doing more. In fact, I'm about the same age as you, similar profession, and code in C and assembly (on ARM processors) regularly.

One of the things I love about the N900 is that I haven't had to program anything specifically for it, yet. I had 2 projects I really wanted to work on for it, and both were 80% done, the week after I got my phone, and were totally stable. So I threw some donations and testing time to those authors instead. (And as a developer, I know I appreciate detailed testers who file bugs with notes on how to repeat the problem, and maybe even a pointer to the code that's messing things up!)

I'm also syncing with my Exchange server (which it does just fine, thanks), making calls (my call log says 207 calls since November), and lots, lots more. It just works... with little tweaking. It's a shame you weren't able to spend an hour or two to setup the device properly, and only made "two test calls" in the months you've owned it. Sounds like you never really gave it more than a passing glance anyway, which makes me wonder why you bothered... But wait, you said:

Wait... I thought that's what I had! Hmm... uname seems to report back Linux... That IS what I have. And anything compiled to run on a debian-ish ARM system with a reasonably recent library set seems to work just fine... Some of the apps from the manufacturer behave a little oddly at times, but otherwise, it seems quite Linux based to me. You do know that even Slackware, the initial distro put together by Linus himself, has packages with closed-source drivers, right? Last I looked there was a Flash package for Slackware... Closed source.

Maybe what you want it a magical pixy phone that can expand to 8 times it's normal size on command, runs four days on a charge, with constant high-end multi-CPU usage, that can auto-detect and use/run/edit/play any format file and sync with everything up to and including the proprietary data chip embedded in your pet. All out of the box, without needing to configure anything (it should just know that's your pet, right?) Enjoy your hunt Ahab... and watch out for that ticking noise!