All I see on the horizon these days are corporations lusting after the dollars Apple is making, and therefore copying everything they do. In short, devices specifically targeted towards technophobes. No keyboards, no stylii -- a fingerpainting-based ui is sufficient! Besides, users are consumers of data, not producers. They should just sit back and watch the device. And, of course spend money while doing it.

And yeah, no access to the underlying OS, no ability to run arbitrary software, heck, the last time I touched iOS you couldn't even put files on the internal storage yourself, only iTunes is allowed to do so. (Dunno if that has changed any in the last year or two.)

I don't know how long my n900 will last (or if I'll be able to find replacements for it), but I'm starting to go back to the idea of carrying around a cheap dumb phone and a small useful computer. As the phone companies continue to churn out locked-down cookie-cutter idiot boxes, there are now a decent variety of little open devices starting to appear:

http://openpandora.org/
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://beagleboard.org/
http://www.gumstix.com/

I still think my old HP Journada was the perfect form factor for truly portable computing. A keyboard just large enough to touch-type on, a screen large enough to be fairly comfortable. I still dream of someday fitting one of these newer boards into it, and setting up the perfect portable Linux box...