So I went to the Nokia flagship store in Chicago after work yesterday to check out the N900 demo unit they had, and here are my impressions.

First off, I had to wait more than 15 minutes to see the phone, it was like asking to see the crown jewels of England. Apparently, only one of the workers there carry and use it, and he was busy "upstairs". I only had 40 minutes on my parking meter and was getting slightly upset. I don't know why they don't have the N900 displayed like the others with the security cables and whatnot.

The first thing that stood out to me was the screen. Very good quality and very responsive for only having a resistive touchscreen. All the scrolling around in webpages and on the main screen worked wonderfully. Web browsing seemed very fast and easy to navigate, pages loaded quickly and flash within youtube.com played just fine over wifi. The salesperson (i don't know why they have more than 4 of them for such a tiny store) specifically mentioned that it will only work on T-mobile's 3G but will work on AT&T's edge just fine. They have a pre-order special where they will give a free bluetooth headset with the N900 (nokia's cheapest, of course. In fact, if you want to buy the headset it's only $20), but they couldn't give me a release date or range of dates, only "soon".

The keyboard, although small was easy to type with, but I will miss the keyboard from my G1. I do wish the keys where spaced further apart, though. In regards to the size of the device, it is a bit bigger than my G1 in length width and thickness, with a bigger screen (3.5", I think). Overall, it seems to be a well built phone, and I would definitely recommend that a screen protector be purchased immediately as the screen is a fingerprint magnet, and also needs to be pressed on slightly harder due to it being resistive.

Oh, one more thing. It weighs more than my G1, but not too much. It's definitely not a brick.

I placed my pre-order last week on Amazon, BTW

Cheers!