Separating complaining from answers, new post.

I'll skip the common stuff, like email searching and video call.

Things I hate:

40%
* Maps suck. No saving points, no searching points, little to no usability offline. I'm still using my handheld PNA. That costs 1/10. Aw well.

30%
* "calling" screen is wasted. We have nice photos of loved ones. Accept better photos. Accept videos or animations. And make the portraits larger, dammit, what's with the 40 pixel images? And why can't I have a loved one waving while it's ringing? GIF is like 40 years old. Animated PNGs. AVI. Whatever.

70%
* Graphics. Dude, the swipe to unlock "ball" is squareish. It looks like it's been drawn by upsizing a small ball with no interpolation. Style on the outside, little style on the inside. Hold an iPhone sometimes. I hate the damned thing, but you can't help but admire the neatness of it all. Round buttons, nice controls, glass finish, embossed text. Say what you will, the N900 UI looks like it's free. I am aware of theme ability, but out of the box it's average. Replace the cheap gradient with a glass gradient.

It's not like it takes more resources to animate a better icon. It's Photoshop versus Paint.

20%
* Menu sucks. The "more" business is OK in the beginning, but now I have most stuff I want on desktop, I never use the first screen unless I use settings. Really. In an application, click the icon for expose, then again for menu, then again for more. Bah. And folders, people. Grouping. Ordering. Every update my stuff moves around like crazy. I never know where they are.

10%
* No aligning to grid on desktop. It looks childish. No ability to customize icons. I would like to see a red outline on an icon for a change, better visibility. I could have red for family contacts and green for work on desktop. Or a dot. or an overlay, something.

30%
* No compass. Mapping is very hard to look at when north is unknown. WTH, people, you know where I am and what time it is. Just let me point the device at the sun and that should tell me where north is. Enough to tell me that the street i want is to the right. Intersection-level north is not hard to achieve. I played with IPhone compass today. Shaken enough, I got the darned thing to miss by 45 degrees. It's still usable in an intersection.