OK, I've had mine a few hours now. First impressions:

Like some others, I was also worried that I'd break the back cover when taking it off. No wonder Nokia has to put that instructional sticker on the back, otherwise you'd never believe it was supposed to open that way.

I had a lot of trouble getting the SIM card in. I was wondering if the card was maybe just a little too thick, because it made the metal clip pop out of its housing. I thought I might have broken it, but I was able to get the clip back into place, then I found that the SIM card hadn't been in the right position. After that, no problem.

Lots of troubles setting up the WiFi. At first, I couldn't find the right options, because I naiively assumed that the options under "Internet Connections" would be as extensive as those under "Connectivity". Silly me. Even once I got that sorted out, WiFi didn't work until I rebooted. No problems since then, though.

The browser is plenty powerful. I get plenty of crosshatching when I scroll, but the whole experience is so much faster than browsing on the N810. The performance is really superb, and all the websites I tried render really well.

I'm disappointed though that the double-tap-to-zoom doesn't always get the scaling quite right. Side-by-side with my daughter's iPod touch is quite embarrassing for the N900, because the iPod gets the double-tap scaling so right. It really makes a difference to the browsing experience.

YouTube works fine, and looks great in full-screen view. But what I would really like is an easy way to change the volume in this situation (the volume buttons are co-opted as zoom buttons in this situation). But you can leave YouTube playing a playlist full-screen, and the videos just keep coming and looking great.

I took a photo, then took a video so that I could check that the microphone was working (it was). Used the inbuilt image editor to crop and save the photo, then tried to delete the photo and got a message something like "deletion failed". Couldn't get rid of the photo until I closed the image viewer and re-opened it.

Overall, the device feels much more flimsy than I thought it was going to. After using it for a couple of hours I picked up the N810 which just felt so solid by comparison.

I can see that it's going to take a few weeks to learn not to do the things that don't work, and to discover all the things that do work really well. I call this process "bedding in", and it seems to be a necessary part of coming to terms with any new hardware device (or software application for that matter) because there's no longer the expectation that they will work without flaws.

I had been hesitant about the N900 because of the smaller screen compared to the N810. After using the N900 I feel that the screen really is way too small for what I want to do on it. This is a real bummer. The N900 is on its way to be a fabulous phone, and also a great "casual internet on the go" device, but I just can't see it becoming my internet tablet.

I'll see how I feel about this after a couple of weeks.

Now, off to explore the media player, then get the device set up for Python development.

Regards,
Roger