Rui CarmoWhoa. If anything is likely to make me turn to FreeBSD, this will.
Just joking - what Progeny is doing makes perfect sense - Debian needs a decent installer and it's plain stupid to have umpteen different package formats among Linux distributions.
Like ArsTechnica puts it, this is only a starting point - it's up to the Linux "community" (that strange set of often warring factions) to get their act together and make such a merger work.
N-Gage Sales?
The claims of 400.000 units sold weren't looking that good in the first place (especially since commentators keep pointing out numbers shipped to retailers are not actual sales), but now people are starting to talk about price cuts. Since it's Slashdot, I'm taking this with a very large grain of salt (about pebble-sized), but it's definelty another dark spot in the thing's reputation (the 3300 also sold rather poorly, but people already forgot about it...).
The Motorola Twist
The Motorola/MPX200 is going on sale over here, and I took some time to look over the specs and ponder the implications. Motorola always had usability problems (the joke was that they actually worsened their UI with every new phone release) and Symbian wasn't exactly their piece of cake, so it's natural that they would take up the Microsoft platform in order to compete with Symbian.
The phone itself is the ultimate embodiment of what Microsoft envisioned for its mobile platform: the ultimate PC satellite, with mini Outlook, IE, MSN Messenger, ActiveSync, Media Player and whatnot.
But it has three unforgivable flaws, right off the bat: no built-in camera (which means no operator will consider it as a way to drive up MMS traffic), no Bluetooth (which means no wireless headsets and no way to use it for PDA connectivity), and it is utterly dependent on a PC.
While Nokia and SonyEricsson have already figured out that phones are now communication devices and need some way to both create MMS content and connect to other devices, Motorola and Microsoft churned out... just phones. And, even worse, phones that are inextricably tied to a specific set of technologies that are not exactly GSM operator-friendly (in either the technical or licensing planes - because you'll need a Microsoft platform to support Microsoft phones, of course...)
I suppose that they'll keep at it for years, and that operators will eventually be forced to support these devices. Can't say I'm keen to try one, though - if only because it's already outdated - it runs the 2002 software release, not this year's...