Can't argue with that if it's a dealbreaker for you, though I think the screen's fine.

Not really... I don't know who got screwed over by sheer luck and possibly got ones with faulty connectors, but I've never had an issue with it, and there's plenty of people in the threads *****ing about the connector that say they've never had an issue with it. I don't know what "fragile" means to you, but either you got a defective unit, or you do things to your N900 when it's plugged in that should never be done to anything connected to a wire. Basically, I really don't know why you think the N900's connector is any less fragile than reasonable for a microUSB port. I get that a lot of people have problems with it, but there's plenty more who don't.

After installing rootsh and spending a few minutes in the rx-51 file, you can get almost everything you'd ever need to type available to you.

I've got |, (broken bar), (tab), (delete), (Esc), {, }, [, ], (Plusminus), (multiplication dot - called "centerdot" or "middledot" or something - I can look it up if you'd like), division sign, the guillemets, <, >, (less than or equals), (greater than or equals), not-equal sign, degree sign, infinity sign, generic-currency symbol, ^, ~, and Home/End/PageUp/PageDown...

And a few things like diaeresis, abovedot, grave and accute accents, and the upside-down version of ^ (caron, I think it's called), mapped as dead keys, which gives me a choice or writing more characters than I know what to do with.

Now, that's not to say that the Nxx0s can't have their keys remapped either, that same way or better - they probably can - but unless you're as anal as me about having access to as many characters you might possibly use as possible, I doubt you couldn't get all the characters you want mapped to Shift+Fn+(key) combinations in five minutes.

- That said -

I think "Just get an N900" isn't very great advice. My advice wouldn't be very practical though: Contact the people who make the OMAP SoCs (Texas Instruments? I don't know), but a few of their latest and best, get yourself someone with a wealth of OS and BIOS experience just in case, buy a couple spare N8x0s to experiment with, and get to work with a sautering (not sure how to spell that) iron.