The n8 is a bad smart phone, but it's a good feature phone. Keep in mind that as much as Symbian is a dead-end OS at this point, it's actually a pretty mature OS as well. For example, the n8 has dial by voice working out of the box (great feature paired with a compatible bluetooth headset). The n900 (and I'm betting the N9) can't do dial by voice well if at all.

Unlike a quality smart phone, the N8 doesn't let you tweak it too much. For example, widgets are limited and they can only be placed in one of 6 slots on any one of 3 provided home screens (minus one slot always used by a required date/time widget).There's no such thing as adding or removing home screens. There's no access to power user tools such as dbus scripts or queen bee widgets. You can't simply add a bluetooth PAN profile to tether with, and man, does it suck not having an FM transmitter toggle widget available. However, there are some apps ouch there like JoikuSpot as well as some polished games that make it a step up from a purely dumb phone.

With all that said, with the current price of a good smart phone at about the $600 range, I'd expect something like the n8 to start around the $300-350 range, and be well below that over a year after it's launch.

I think both phones are actually overpriced for today's standards, but as a long time Nokia fan, both are good for different purposes. My n900 broke recently, so I'm doing an N8/TouchPad pairing atm with ad hoc wifi. It's functional. However, it's not as stable as my n900/Galaxy Tab pairing with bluetooth pan, and I really miss having a more fully featured smart phone. I don't think I can justify an n9 at it's cost and no support in the US personally (especially given all the various hardware issues people seem to be having with it).