Good meet up in Chicago tonight. There were 6 or 7 Nokia reps who had N900s. You could chat them up and try the phone. Pretty good feel to the N900. The black matte finish doesn't show fingerprints, however, the screen does.

Anyway, I had about 12 applications running at once (over wifi not TMobile) and they snapped open and closed pretty fast. Some good integration of Skype (we'll see how the lawsuit against EBay goes), Google Talk and SIP. Skype account info was updated into your address book. Someone changes their phone number it will automatically change in your phone book.

Calendar synthesizes multiple calendars into one (Ovi) calendar. Really great integration of Qik on the phone for immediate uploading to Facebook, Youtube and Ovi. The N900 was plugged into a 40 inch plasma set and we went through what the interface looked like as well as what media and games looked like. Pretty nice.

Now for the part that folks are not happy about: the release date. Here is a quote "we are hoping for a November release...but definitely this year." There were a couple of gasps along with some chuckles. It was explained that after some of the developers had extended hands-on time with the N900, they came back with a "wish list". Nokia decided to try to bake those changes into the phone, pre-release rather than through any firmware update. They felt that "it was the right thing to do."

They feel that the developer community will support the Maemo platform because the QT application development tool will allow cross platform development (write an app on QT for Symbian and it will work on Maemo, and vice versa). That was cool to hear. You could see where the new applications would mushroom out, over time.

It sounds like there may be 2 other N900 meet ups (Moscow + either Barcelona or Madrid) as well as "informal" or grass roots meet ups (they called them shadow events).

In sum: really nice product. I will get one. I just don't know when they will be released.

I am also going to post this on the GDGT board, verbatim, as I don't feel like typing it out again. So if you are on both boards, sorry to "double post"