I wish Nokia would do something tangible sooner than later.. there's some very good competition out there rearing up. I saw this one pretty recently and it looks very attractive:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/02/t...e-tablet-netb/

I don't see competition at all.
I see a lot of nice *hardware*, but no UI is jumping out at me that makes me even want to jump *.

*heh, well I know what UI i want

Oh yeah, CDE, baby!

Oh wow, that's so much more tangible.

They have a physical mockup, gizmodo has pics.

Twenty-eight years ago I had a physical mock up of a lightsaber. The finished device still hasn't shipped.

More seriously, I give you: The Pandora!

Yea, to be quite honest, I'm more a believer in the "we're spending our time building a real product, we'll let you know when it's ready" approach compared to "and here's another beautiful piece of plastic that our marketing department things looks pretty sweet... what engineers? Yea, we asked them what the best components would be, but we didn't want them involved in the mock-ups... they always take the fun out of those things by demanding practical and producible results!".
lol that's just my take anyways ;o) In all seriousness, a mockup is a good step (especially if it's actually a proto-type with some good, serious effort behind it), but the difference between proto-type and finished product is usually quite large; and I'm not a big fan of sales pitches, so for me it's always who gets to the real, in your hand device that I can buy and use for my purposes first; all the rest of the bs in between is just to try and distract you from the time it takes to actually build a product from scratch.
(Btw, if you're that eager for mockups, I could throw together an RX-51 for you, no problemo... it probably has as much hope of resembling the final device and functionality as any other early stage mockup does! ;o) )

I really believe that what the Russian journalist Eldar Murtazin saw in the MWC meeting (see this article) was a functioning prototype of a Maemo 5 device. I strongly believe that it was probably an RX-51 prototype. Nokia is probably quite relieved that the UnwiredView people spun it as a Sparrow device to be released in 2011.

I mean, think about it. It seems that the prototype was actually running an OS. What kind of "early prototype" has a polished-looking OS running on it?

Frustratingly, the article doesn't mention the D-Pad's location. (Their photoshop mock-up just guesses based on the N97's placement.)

This seems like a likely possibility. The discussion of a "widget-based" interface threw me initially (they've traditionally been called "applets"), but the alpha release revealed that they are, now, in fact, widgets.

This is probably a stupid comment, but what's the device in the OS2008 "Getting Started" applet if not the RX-51? It sure isn't an N800 or N810.