Hey there, my N900 arrived today, and knowing there's a strong Australian demand for this phone yet no planned release here, I thought I'd do my fellow Aussies a service by sharing my experience.

Purchasing the N900 can be done locally from ebay and certain online retailers, but I chose to import mine from the USA.

I used Price USA and can recommend them (I'm not getting any kickback for this, just mentioning them because it worked for me), though there are other services offering importation of US goods. The process involves informing the service of the product you want, they invoice you the cost in AUD, you pay them that amount and they then buy the item in the US then post it internationally. Due to the exchange rate this is a very economical way to go, the total cost to me was around $700 AUD, which is several hundred cheaper than anything on ebay at the time of writing.

As the N900 was out of stock when I placed my order (good to know sales are going well!) it took a while to arrive, but once the phone was ordered it took just over 4 weeks to arrive (this is over the christmas/new years season too, so delays are expected).

The phone itself works perfectly with a 3 sim card in metropolitan Melbourne. It should work fine with all Australian carriers except Telstra. Telstra NextG runs on the 850mhz frequency, which the N900's cellular radio doesn't use, so only 2G service will be available with Telstra. Also note that because 3 now offers 3G roaming on Telstra's NextG network, the N900 with a 3 simcard will be 2G only in those zones as well.

The only setting I needed to plug in to the phone was the access point name (3services in my case) - even the message center number was automatically detected. Nice one.

You'll notice that no Australian timezones are available when initially setting up the phone, just select anything and change it from within the phone's settings later - all time zones are available there.

Aside from that, it's smooth sailing. I'm enjoying this phone immensely, and while it's an amazing package already you can certainly sense its potential. Any Aussies who are considering buying this phone but are put off by the logistics and Nokia's lack of a planned official local release, should be aware that it's actually quite easy to bring it over and very worthwhile.

Thanks guys, that's all, I hope this helped someone!