The remark about fragmentation is very true Armin, but unfortunately I don't think it's in the "risk" stage anymore, it's a reality today. There is Qtopia for the Sharp Zaurus and Archos PMA lines and some phone-like devices, Maemo for the Nokia ITs, another Linux coming for Palms, etc. And that's only the corporate efforts, but the various communities are perfectly capable of fragmenting themselves too : look at the sheer number of competing (and mutually incompatible) distros for a popular but confidential platform like the Sharp Zaurus, you'll probably need the fingers of both hands :-)

I think Nokia hit it out of the park with the physical form factor of the N800 itself and I do believe THAT was what Microsoft was trying to get across to the various hardware manufacturers but something got lost "in translation" obviously.
Hardware wise...well, Nokia used what works at the moment I guess.
Right now the N800 is perfect for my needs. Web browsing, occasional email checks, once-in-a-while video/audio use, and the occasional game. For the most part when I travel the laptop stays in its bag until I feel I need a "heavy-hitter" to do something.
I NEVER liked the UMPC specs or lineup at all. Honestly, asking desktop/laptop manufacturers to make something small and powerful usually winds up an abomination (Windows CE v1 devices anyone?) while the small consumer electronics and cell phone manufacturers have the physical format pretty much down pat (Sharp, Nokia, and for the most part Palm and RIM).
Microsoft pitched their Origami idea to the wrong damn crowd. They should have pitched it to the cell phone and consumer electronics companies exclusively and told the big PC manufacturers to take a friggin' hike on this one.

Yeah, I intend to host my applications on a corporate intranet site using active server pages (ASP). I'll be coding most of it and using canned stuff (especially the functionality in SQL server 2005) where I can. I've got it partially working.

The main hold up for now is VPN. We have some guys developing a tool for internal use and it isn't quite 100%. Our corporate solution relies on SecureId cards so if an oss application was developed that worked with our system that would be ideal. The main problem I'm having now is resolving short server names into fully qualified domain names (fqdn)... I can't seem to get the VPN development team to understand how important that is to some commercial apps (they tell me *I* should always use fqdn, duh, but try telling every third party developer).

Sounds to me like something my "employer" has been doing for years now.
On our smartcards are our embedded PKI certificates and each card has a 10-digit number on it in front of @our-domain-name.
In Active Directory all of our accounts are mapped to this 10-digit code so we can login just using our smartcard PIN codes (PIN != 10-digit on card).
Microsoft did develop some hella-useful software that integrates all of this at our bequest, but I just don't see the same ease-of-use and deployment in any OSS offerings at the moment.
Problem is, using a hardware-based token for this - as well as via our Cisco 3000 VPN Concentrators scattered all over the planet - means we can't use small devices like the Nokia N800 tablet or Nokia N80i/N95 cell phones unless we somehow obtain a software token to use with the same.
Which my employer says isn't going to happen. Ever.

But lately the only thing we're using ASP and SQL 2005 for is with Sharepoint 2007.
For everything else we tend to use PHP and MySQL running on Server 2003.
I would suggest you start programming for that as it makes the code itself a lot more portable between varying server operating systems and hardware upgrades.
Add to that the capability for almost every single portable and non-portable web browsing machine out there to work with it versus ASP's more advanced functions generally only working well with IE 6/7.

Yeah, I'm pretty much stuck with the tools I have and know (and lucky to have them...lol). As a developer/analyst/dba I force the issue as much as I am able but it's hard budging a monolithic corporation... :/

Anyway, anything I develop is for internal use only so portability isn't that much of an issue.