Joerg posted a short update a few days ago:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1492838

One more small item: one of the greater headaches we had were the flash LEDs: we couldn't find any as small as the ones Nokia had used, and all the larger ones would have required major contortion in the design. (Really bad things, like having to move the LEDs to the main PCB and out of the optical axis, then somehow constructing a light guide all the while preventing light leaks. Something we have no experience with. This had "engineering disaster" written all over it.) The good news is that we finally did find a (new, I guess) series of LEDs (LUXEON 3020 series) that have almost perfect characteristics and won't need crazy tweaks.

Hmm no, most things we're doing these days are still of the paper-pushing type (whitepapers, component searches, and such).

I just realized that I never made that comparison picture Malakai had asked about. Sorry about that ! Now that I have a few N900 there's no excuse for delaying this. I'll see to it asap.

- Werner