Cellular: during our last holidays, the N9 had usable reception, and with the same provider, my Acer Liquid android phone showed no network.
BTW, don't compare different phones amount of bars of signal strength; sometimes, the Liquid showed 3 of 4 bars, the N9 only 1, but the N9 could actually make a call, and the Liquid showed 'no network' as soon as I tried to make a call or send an SMS...
As for talking, speech clarity is fine both ways.
I have to try how long it takes when picking up the phone before the other party can hear it; my android phone and home phone are both not so fast on that, so I may have adapted and just not talk immediately...


Wifi: 2 issues; during said holidays, there was free wifi near the hotel reception. For every device except the N9... It was hard to get connected on that network for everyone (laptops, iphones, android phones/tablets) but the N9 was one of the few devices that was not actually finding this network..! After a few days it did find it, and the network was usable. Not great in terms of connection, some laptop users could sit quite a bit further and still have usable speeds, where the N9 lost connection; didn't see small mobile devices do really better though.
Second issue: often the N9 will not find my home network. If I tell it to connect to my home network (settings - internet conn - manage networks - then select my home SSID) it will connect. I will be able to ssh into it, but it won't be able to load any webpages.
It will be able to ping google and such, and route shows proper info, etc... Very strange. A reboot is all that helps at that point.


GPS: for logging, I use Track@Way. It has some problems on N9, notably with the keyboard being in the way. Workaround: slide down the keyboard to see what you're typing, and you'll be fine.
From the logs that it made, I can say that GPS reception seems quite fine. I tried maps and navigation with the build-in programs, also fine (except for wrong map info, which I corrected on the Navteq site), but not seriously tested by me so far.
Note that in buildings, it doesn't help to stand near the window, where I work there's a coating that blocks gps signal, and at home with the triple glass, the reception is poor unless there's a sat in front of the window (i.e. low above the horizon, I know they're in space..) as opposed to 'up'.
Note that without a-gps, it may take about 5 minutes to get a fix, and theoretically it can take up to 20+ minutes (only 4 sats in view, and the gps gets activated just after 2 of those visible sats' ephemeris data got streamed).
To get a fast fix, if you have no data plan, stand on your balcony/terrace but with wifi on/connected to your lan, then use a gps app - it should be very fast to get a fix.

This is all still on PR1.0 since PR1.1 is not out yet (yes I could upload a firmware for another region/type, but I want to see if Nokia will fix this).



Note: fw 2011.44 is like 2011.40: PR1.1 but with different (middle eastern?) language support.


lennyk1313, why would you switch to flight mode if there's no (or too bad) reception? It shouldn't cost more than being connected and idling, which your phone would otherwise be doing. Switching to flight mode you have the risk to forget it, and then you still won't get a connection once reception is improved.