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Aye, especially a keyboard and a sane operating system are a must. You'd have to go over my dead body to take away my N900, even though it's getting really long in the tooth (like, no usable graphical browser: MicroB can't handle any SSL anymore, modern browsers can't run in 256 total RAM with only ~100ish left after Nokia's crap), but is good enough that sometimes I do several hours long hacking sessions in the bed without even bothering to get to the big computer a few meters away.

Neo900 is an expensive piece of vapourware with ancient specs. Keyboard attachments for Android dumbphones are useless. Proper replacements are also vapourware (Pyra, Minotaur One. I've gambled $380 for a Gemini, but there are doubts even whether they'll deliver, chances for a proper mainline kernel rivallling those of a snowcone in hell.

Well, N900 is ancient but there's still no upgrade. Neo900 is expensive almost-same-spec vapourware (it gets you 512MB instead of 256MB memory, slightly better CPU and that's it, for $750 when you can get an used N900 for $25), Pyra is ridiculously thick vapourware (new phones are way too thin, Pyra goes the other extreme), Minotaur One looks more reasonable than Pyra but is even more vaporous. Both of these don't pretend to be phones, I think N900's thickness is about the sweet spot.

Nokia's default keymapping was downright retarded -- to get most symbols, you had to press a key combination to pull an on-screen menu then you had to click the symbol; the obvious solution is to assign shift-or-fn combinations to all keys, there's enough of them to cover all of ASCII.

Though, not as sexy, the closest you may get in the near future is the Pyra, which is based on the older Open Pandora:

https://pyra-handheld.com/boar...

Primarily, these devices were meant at the microlaptop/game device market, but they do take a sim card. What's left would be to program a reasonable phone calling program, unless one already exists that I don't know about. Technically, there's libgsm, but that's the low level libraries.

Anyway, not a perfect solution, but perhaps a viable one with a little bit of work.

"P.S. I would love a small form-factor PC running a 64-bit ARM chip with completely passive cooling and running Linux." Try a Pyra when available: https://pyra-handheld.com/boar...

I was also watching the Neo900 project for a while, but they made some bad decisions.
It's too expensive because they didn't want to compromise on anything, and they decided to add a separator will make a thick phone even thicker.
I would have bought it if the price was around 400 euro and it didn't need a separator.
Now I'm placing my bets on the Pyra

The name of the successor will by Pyra.

Hi

Have a Pandora myself, excellent little machine.

It would have likely been out a lot sooner but there was a financial crash in 2009 (you may have heard something about it) which caused a fair number of delays/problems. Also Paypal decided to mess OpenPandora about to a massive extent, even refunding everyone and blocking purchases at one point!
As if that wasn't enough, the first PCB manufacturer proved to be completely incompetent, shipping faulty boards, at one time bent boards and failing to replace them, give the money back or in fact do anything to put right their screwup, it was when ED moved production to Germany things started running much more smoothly.

It was never supposed to be only a gaming platform, it is a full linux system which fits in your pocket (it can also run other operating systems from SD card, RISC OS for one)

The UK operation suffered from being operated by a liar and a thief, this was unforeseeable. (incidentally, the same person (Craig) has run off with all the icontrolpad 2 Kickstarter money as well it seems after using other peoples money to buy himself 3d printers and so on.)

Yes, the spec isn't as impressive as it was when announced but it's still a useful system.

Incidentally, the Pandora's successor (The Dragonbox Pyra) is in development now and has a far better spec. Also a Craig free system (Yay!), you can read some information about that at http://www.pyra-handheld.com/ if you're interested.