With one exception (Sharp GX10i - bleh!) I've only ever had Nokia phones. Maybe that qualifies me as a fanboi, I don't know.

In my defence, I would point out that as each contract has come up for renewal, I've looked at the handsets on the market and wound up plumping for yet another Nokia. So far, my list looks like this:

Nokia 7110 - died of water damage
Nokia 6600 - survived contract, donated to wife who left it in the back of a taxi
Nokia 6680 - survived contract, donated to wife who looked after it
Nokia N93 - survived contract, donated to eldest daughter who broke 2 of the buttons off it
Nokia N95 8GB - current handset, still going strong after 20 months, best handset I've had so far
Nokia 5800 - impulse purchase for wife to replace ancient 6680

Earlier this year, I was very briefly the proud owner of a Samsung i8910 on Orange. The handset was superb (3.8 inch AMOLED touch screen and built in DiVX support) but the network coverage from Orange was abysmal, so it went back after 5 days. The i8910 isn't available on any other network in the UK unless you buy SIM-free for around £550, so that was the end of that.

I got quite excited when the N97 was announced, but a detailed look at the hardware specs and 10 minutes playing with one soon convinced me to leave well alone.

I've had it with Symbian as a smart phone platform - the straw that broke the camels back for me was the call log 'bug' on all S60 3rd editon and 5th edition handsets that many people (incorrectly as i turned out) blamed on Nokia. It turned out that the bug was in fact a feature (Google 'S60 call log bug') introduced by Symbian cuz they know best. Don't even get me going on the old signed/unsigned SIS files thing...

Anyhoo, the N900 was announced and I got interested again. A fresh direction for Nokia, phone and NIT in the same device, with funky touch screen, decent hardware to run it on and Linux as the underlying OS. My N900 won't be with me until after December 3rd, at which point Nokia and I will be drinking together in the last chance saloon. If it turns out to be a pile of fetid dingos kidneys, than I'll start looking at other manufacturers/platforms.

In short, I don't believe I have any firm expectations this time round. I've volunteered to buy in to a completely new product line, but only because I can't see the N-series going much further for Nokia unless Maemo takes off in a big way in the next 12 - 24 months. I hope I'll be pleasantly surprised, but it won't be the end of the world if I find myself typing "+1" on the "N900 sucks" thread in 6 months time.