I did not want to add to the angst of this thread until I had something solid to say.

I pre-ordered on 18 September with overnight shipping to California and had my price adjusted down down twice. The second time was on 20 Nov to $529.

I had been in the "Shipping Soon" (no changes can be made) limbo from Tues 24 Nov till this morning Sun 29 Nov. At 12:30 AM this morning I received my "Your Order Has Shipped" email, with an estimated delivery date of 30 Nov. FedEx tracking does not have any location history on my package, however it does show some interesting date history.

"Shipping information sent to FedEx" 27 Nov 3PM EST origin-time
"Anticipated ship date" 28 Nov
"Estimated Delivery" 30 Nov by 3PM

There was significant delay between these events and my shipping notification (yes, I was checking Amazon's site a, um, err, "few" times daily). This leads to lean toward the theory that Amazon has some misguided notion that no one should receive the N900 before 30 Nov. Note that I have always had overnight shipping on this order.

Note that I contacted Amazon for a price drop/match on 20 Nov and yet my order just shipped. Clearly doing this does not put you at the end of the queue.

Amazon does not charge sales tax in CA, Nokia, Newegg and Dell do. I am not terribly keen on rebates (worth less than full dollar value due to risk/hassle). So I choose and stayed with Amazon. I have had multiple terrible experiences with yo-yo-ing shipping dated from Dell, so I will only order from them for Dell products.

I was not terribly keen to reorder and lose my place in queue based on my one-month-from-release-to-shipping experience with the N810 ordered from Nokia/Letstalk. (Remember the freezer-workaround to boot issues? (race condition in the kernel))

I am not terribly surprised that the FedEx location history is missing, FedEx has never been great on real-time location information, but their estimated delivery dates are solid -- focus on what really matters. Contrast to UPS which has excellent real-time updates to agonize over while trying to figure what is taking your package so long.

I expect an exciting and bumpy start with my N900 eased with having my N810 and old mobile on hot standby.