Have you ever dreamed of to ssh into your phone and install Gnome stuff with apt-get? Well at least some have and thus created OpenMoko but sadly they only managed to produce two prototypes with unusable software. Well you can still install android on them, but then you basically use Java instead of the traditional Linux software stack. This is also the “problem” which you get most of the current Android phones. Well of course apart from being locked in to google.
But there is hope! It seems like Nokia is finallay putting Maemo on a real phone. See this photo for the looks. In case you have missed the Maemo up to now: it is a Gnome based desktop for MID – just like Ubuntu MID, but better designed. And the best news is that it will use a Clutter based interface for the next release – just like Moblin. This makes Maemo look really slick.
Besides of the looks it uses all the Gnome internals which Ubuntu uses (at least Karmic): Telepathy for Messaging, Firefox as the browser an evolution based Mail client. I currently use it on my N800 and it is really great; want to try out Fennec instead of the pre-installed browser? One click automatically adds a new apt repository.
This probably reads like a straight advert, but I really waited for a phone like this.
As a sidenote: clutter seems to have quite a momentum this days: Moblin, Maemo, Gnome3 …