Due to the uncertain North America availability of the Jolla (yes, I did book a pre-order - for what it's worth) I resolved to grab
a cheap, mint, Galaxy Nexus off ebay and dogfood the Ubuntu Touch alpha to explore it as a replacement for my N900.

If there are any specific questions, ask away and I'll spend some time digging for the answers. I intend to watch the Ubuntu core app development progress closely and possibly create qt5 interfaces myself for any programs I notice that I'm still missing from maemo/gtk/x11


Pulled my SIM from n900 Monday afternoon.
Some initial thoughts so far after 24hrs sans maemo...

Ubuntu Touch:
* exclusive use of qt5 for all ui/apps makes it look and feel exactly like what I remember from building UI's in the Qt SDK/Harmattan Simulator
* unity8 is like an unidirectional Swipe interface. Rightswipe cycles through running apps, while left-halfswipe/fullswipe dedicated to bringing up the unity launcher. Combined with the pulldown topbar for wifi/volume, etc. the overall effect is more smooth and navigable than the somewhat unintuitive Fremantle. Swipe down to close would be niiice, but I'm sure NOK has that patented.
* you can really tell the ubuntu team is currently in the act of building out their core apps, about 50% of all menu's and features are placeholders, mockups, or half functional/empty
* Already miss Gnumeric, and having a native GPS/maps program


Galaxy Nexus:
* even with unity status bar and maliit onscreen for typing, there's still a good 720x745 visible for the application, and physically within 4% of the total screen real estate of the n900. Obviously the rest of the 1280 vertical pixes becomes usable when you close maliit.
* data signal reception (T-Mobile) seems a little better indoors with thick concrete/few windows (government building) while simultaneously burning through battery less. We'll see how this does over time.. I typically charge n900 1,350mAh about 3-4 hours a day, switching to wifi or offline mode at home.
* pentile AMOLED display quality is lukewarm. Plenty bright and clear, but block colors of non-black/non-white have that faint pentile, 'linen'-like mura grid pattern. About as distracting as the n770's rainbow distortion (you get used to it); sunlight readability is around a 5/10, with n900 being 8.2/10 and n810 a cool 8.7/10
* not particularly oleophobic.