It was only first when I noticed the N900 that devices of this size * REALLY * became interesting for me. Shiny mobiles was nice to have, but this was something else. It was an internet tablet, and yeah it could do phone too.
It was a linux based thingy with a lot of child diseases but I just love it.
There doesn't even today exist anything like it, everything else is just phones, and I don't get the idea why the heck people bother about those clumsy thingys. The N900 is everything else...and a phone.

So, yes, Nokia<-->M$ is an evil merger, that sure brings a sad future for the open sourced device with free communities.

About WinPhone7 (again, from my own oppinion). I have really loved WinCE for many years and worked with it professionally. It's a really nice OS in the bottom there and cannot really be compared with otherwise bloated desktop OS'es developed by M$. WinPhone7 however I don't like for many reasons, one is the DRM crap and other stupid US moral-way-of-life decisions it is based on (like forbidding any application that would even contain a pubic hair in it).

So, finally I'd like to say it is sad that Nokia go this way when they really have the MeeGo coming up...it was SOOO promising.
"SmartPhones" are tech. devices I don't give a *hit about how they look or behave, so I better wait til something else comes up that ressembles the N900 (because the N900 isn't just a smartphone).
I don't care about +50000 apps to download or how * smoooooth* the user interface looks. It just superficial eye-candy.