A smart phone is, by definition, a cellular device. It doesn't need to be said.

Oh please, stop trolling!
http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/business/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219200384

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) said it remains strongly committed to the Symbian operating system for its future smartphones.

The company was responding to a report in the German version of the Financial Times which said the world's largest handset maker was thinking of moving away from Symbian because it was too "cumbersome." The report, which relied on unnamed sources close to Nokia, said the handset maker was more interested in its Maemo platform for future smartphones.

"We remain strongly committed to our current open OS software strategy for cellular devices, which is based on the world-leading Symbian OS," Nokia said in a statement.

They are the ones making the bulk of the contributions to Symbian^3 and Symbian^4, so I would assume that they have at least a passing interest in the platform.

Sorry, that's complete crap; the Symbian roadmap has been public for months: almost 8 months since that blog post alone.

I have every intention of ending world hunger. Do I get a prize, too?

If it seemed like you were 60% towards that goal, and giving you the Nobel Peace Prize would push you over the hump and give you the political capital to get you much nearer to 100%, they would probably give it to you.

Read Robert Naiman's opinion, including the tale of Desmond Tutu winning in '84:

The Nobel Committee gave South African Bishop Desmond Tutu the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his leadership of efforts to abolish apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid wasn't fully abolished in South Africa until 1994. The committee could have waited until after apartheid was abolished to say, "Well done!" But the point of the award was to help bring down apartheid by strengthening Bishop Tutu's efforts. In particular, everyone knew that it was going to be much harder for the apartheid regime to crack down on Tutu after the Nobel Committee wrapped him in its protective cloak of world praise.

Like this?

No, you do not have a .NET runtime. You have a way of using .NET to build apps using the Apple UI objects, and compiling them to native code. The "plethora of Mono apps" you refer to are generally written using Gtk#, and would have to be re-architected to use the iPhone UI.

1. It's not a "shell" or a "runtime", it is ahead-of-time compiled down to native code.
2. This is a wrapper around native Apple UI objects, it's not using any Windows or .NET UI objects. You use the Apple Interface Builder just like you would if you were using Objective C.

It compiles to native code. It just allows you to use C# to do it.

MonoTouch is not a runtime or an "app", it's a library with which you compile your own apps. It's ahead-of-time compiled, so you end up with a binary that runs on the iPhone.

It opens up iPhone development for millions of .NET developers, many of which may not have any interest in Objective C. And as far as I can tell, C#/Mono is garbage collected, and Objective C (on the iPhone) is not. That alone would make me interested in checking it out.

If you're not interested, that's great, move along.

They want to see open source software running on Windows, and want to see IIS as the web server of record, not Apache.

The non-MS participators (with the somewhat odd, but welcome, exception of Monty Widenius) appear to be mostly from a .NET background - Mono project leader; co-founder of MindTouch, whose engine is built on .NET (but run primarily on Mono); co-founder of DotNetNuke, open source on ASP.NET, run primarily on Windows.

Doesn't mean that the software you run on Windows/IIS is any less Free, however. And you can still run it on Mono.

The fourth iteration (Maemo Fremantle) has a UI built on Hildon/GTK+; the fifth (Maemo Harmattan), a UI built on Qt. I've read 4Q 2010 or 1Q 2011, so app developers have to consider whether or not to use the community-supported Qt API on the existing device, which will become "the" OS in 2011, or build something on GTK+, Maemo/Nokia-supported now, which will become community-supported in Harmattan.

Sounds kind-of like this.

Unbranded maybe (I'm not in the US so can't comment), unlocked, no.