See, I don't think those are all strictly related to the phone thing, especially the screen size.

IMO, from looking at the devices that have made it to market and been successful, there's an unstable equilibrium in screen sizes about 6" -- anything smaller, people want it smaller so it fits in their pocket better. Anything larger, and they want it bigger so they can see things bigger. (This assumes the same pixel count -- more pixels is generally better, and may or may not overcome an "unfavorable" size difference.) While individual people may vary from that, that seems to be the trend for mass-market devices.

Since the internet tablets have always been on the smaller side of that curve, I think we'd have seen the switch to 3.5" screen anyway, even if it had remained an unphone.


As for additional space... What additional space?
N810: 72*128*14 = 129,024 mm^3
N900: 111*60*19.5 = 129,870 mm^3
Okay, 1% more space... And that's treating the N900 as a box of maximum thickness (when only the camera/kickstand protrudes that far), the same as the N810 (which is essentially flat) -- it's probably the same or less volume in reality.

In fairness, the smaller screen takes up less internal space, so the smaller-screen device having the same size does imply some bloat in the rest of it, but it's not huge, and there's other improvements as well (camera, IRTX, FMTX, FMRX, at least). IMO not enough difference to care about one way or the other -- cost is the only real factor I see.


Frankly, if the N900 came out during the first few months when I'd not yet tethered my N800, I'd probably have opted for a wifi-only N900 if it were even $100 less (which I'm sure it would have been). But having tethered and carried both a tablet (first the N800, then the N810) and a phone practically everywhere for well over 6 months, I'd have easily paid $200 extra for the "phone" version (no matter how much smaller the unphone version was), but at some point I'd have saved the cash and kept the separate phone. I still wish they did have both options (and, while I'm wishing, maybe an AT&T version, for the poor folks stuck in a contract, or in Canada), but having experienced (become addicted to?) always-on connectivity, it wouldn't have changed which one I got.