I made a separate thread, but then I saw this one on first impressions so I'll move mine here...

I got my n900 yesterday and was surprised that it wasn't as chunky as I imagined it would be. The hardware felt nice and solid, no complaints there. They keyboard took some getting used to, but I love the way it feels in my hand, and the three rows really do make it easier to be interactive with the touch screen.

As far as the software goes, the multi-tasking is excellent. It seems fairly intuitive, but it does have a learning curve. There are several things that I dislike, and that I hope will soon be fixed

- Make the backspace key a universal back button. It will take you one space back from wherever you are, or take you back to the home screen. The backspace key is perfectly located for this, and would make it function just like the Motorola Droid.

- Make the shift key bring up the multi-task menu. As far as I know, the shift key doesn't do anything outside of a text entry field, so why not let the shift key also multi task when not on a text field? A long press could bring you to the home screen.

-Move the menu to the lower left corner. Seems like it would be easier to hit when the keyboard is open, which for me at least is most of the time.

-Improve the icon quality, and allow the option for the name of the app to be displayed along side the icon when placed on the desktop.

-Allow the icons to snap to a grid on the desktop

- UI could be more polished, I guess that it a person preference though. Also, some icons need to be rearranged, such as when you press on a contact to call it, why make the icons to select (such as cell, home, sms ect) all the way on the bottom of the screen, and leave the entire upper half blank? Makes them tough to get to in portrait for the cell.

-Portrait mode. Would be really really useful. Every other smartphone has it, why cant the n900?

-Improve phone. Yeah i know phone second, step 4 of 5 bla bla... the bottom line is that most people are going to be sorely dissapointed by the phone aspect.

- Allow the option for the arrow keys to navigate between links on the short press, and scroll on the long press.

-Reduce time to long press on the desktop when selecting icons.

-Could use a more polished notification system.

-The auto screen rotation is wayyy tooo slow. It makes the auto portrait for the phone app almost pointless.

So yeah, the phone isn't perfect, and hopefully these issues can be sorted out, because it has tons of potential. The way it is right now, I don't think I would keep it, but I'm holding out to see if any new firmware updates fix these things. Also, when the device sees more hands some progress may be made.