Since I went ahead and purchased a black UMID from dynamism, I'll provide an initial answer to my own question.
Build is plastic, but fit and finish seem excellent. Some have complained about the angle of the screen in its further position and that the black one doesn't seem to improve much over the white one. Not having a white one I can't compare, but it seems acceptable for my use. Fits reasonably well in my pockets. With the leather case, it is a bit bulkier.
So far I've installed: mediawiki running locally, openoffice, vlc, mplayer, jedit, quasar media player (thanks katastrophe), kde pimpi, fbreader, truecrypt, easytag, homebank (gtk program I discovered from the Nokia). These are all cross-platform programs. I haven't installed ubuntu yet. I found some instructions that list all the drivers needed -- so it is on my list. This means I have to reacquaint myself with windows at the moment.
[blockquote]
Edit: I found directions for installing Ubuntu and associated drivers here, but have not yet had a chance to try them out:
http://designer.dlinkddns.com/blog/?p=257[/blockquote]
Did a quick test of vlc and mplayer without trying to tweak. A sample video I encoded with handbrake with the film setting defaults (which uses h.264) struggles a little bit, but could be watchable. When I get some time, I need to watch and see if it is acceptable. [blockquote]
Edit: It appears that using the right codecs even highdef h.264 should be possible on the UMID at least in windows:
http://forum.pocketables.net/showthread.php?t=4066 [/blockquote]
It is not instant on, but not too bad. My requirement was something that fit in my pocket and could be used to access my work stuff over citrix. This works well for that need.
