Very very true, especially Blackberry. Phone power buttons tend to lie these days -- even the N900, with its alarms that still work as the device is "powered off".

The question that follows from this -- is there any "low-power" state that N900 could be sent to, instead of its current normal power-down state, that would improve its boot performance without unacceptable battery use?

Look forward to trying reinob's init tweaks. Always hated the fritzy startup dots