Wow, incredible how this is getting blown out of proportion!!

I just wanted to share my feelings as a non expert user who´s got a few minutes to play with the phone... And there are people getting suspicious??! (WTF?)

Let me try to clarify a few of my comments:

Obviously the UI is not like a GNOME desktop, that´s obvious. I got that feeling from the iconset on the workspace showing all the apps, it did have a GNOME/human vibe IMHO, but that´s just that, my opinion. Of course, most of the things in Nokia phones look Nokia, regardless of the OS, as the company has some definite branding and logically they will stick to it. Having said so, I could see some elements, mostly in the iconset style, that reminded me to GNOME, that´s all.

As for the performance, it has nothing to do with multitasking. When I started using the phone, I could see no applications open, nothing was running, and just clicking on certain menu items, like "sending email", felt to me a bit slow. It is most likely an OS version thing, like many of you mentioned, just wanted to clarify that I don´t feel it is related to many applications running at the same time, as I don´t think there were any.

Anyways, it feels to me like the Maemo community is similar to the Linux one, and seems to be making the same mistakes, only they can have a lot more impact in the phone arena.

For those of you interested, this is a an actual good read, an article from a UK journalist who was sent a Kubunty 9.10 netbook from none other than Canonical:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/the-bbc-ta...ntu-linux.html

Although I feel like some of the journalist comments are unfair (it makes no sense to expect a Ubuntu box to behave as a Windows one, just like it would not with MacOS), it is important to understand the impact of these very simple things and how they can rule an OS in or out of the mainstream.

This is even more important in the phone world, I think, because phones should be a lot more simple and intuitive. If the N900 starts to generate fuzz about being over complicated or is considered an ugly phone, I think that can translate into poor sales very quickly.

My opinion is that those first few minutes with a device are very critical, because most people don´t really care about custimization or the technical stuff, and it was my experience in those few minutes I was trying to explain here.

I am a Linux user and love it, and that is what atracted me to the N900. As stupid as that may sound, I would rather use a N900 just because it uses Linux instead of propietary software. However, to be blatantly honest, if that wasn´t the case, and based on those few minutes, I would pick up an iPhone over an N900.

I hope the final production models are as good as you guys think and my impression is wrong.