The point is that the n900 was Gnu/Linux with glibc like mama said was good for you and worked along very similar lines to your desktop machine.

Maemo was gtk+ based and many Gnome applications ran really nicely. Eg Gnumeric was great. The desktop dev environment worked so you could port or write stuff from scratch then load it onto your phone. apt-get worked - apt was the app store iirc.

But who cares that stuff?

It was as slick and nice a user interface as the then recently released iphone! No really, I'm not making that up. Fold-out keyboard was terrific too. Way, way ahead of android at that time and arguably still. From memory the touchscreen on the iphone was better but nothing else was.

Microsoft bought nokia and killed it. Nothing has been as good since.