(reporting live from uae!!) hi all, this is the first update that bricked my device . Earlier updates were really smooth. This update actually installed and rebooting message for the device also showed up, but when the device restarted, it never got to the desktop, instead it used to progress to the nokia's connecting people video and than rebooted again. I tried removing and inserting battery and trying again but same behavior. So this also became my first time that i had to flash my device (using windows 7 32 bits). Flashing the device was awefully simpler than i had imagine it would be, just 2 downloads and a single console command line did the magic (but someone tell me whats with this asking for IMEI number while downloading the bin file??).
Btw, to my surprise, flashing does not completely remove everything from the device. My contacts are still there, bookmarks too, all songs are there. But my installed applications are all gone, but will install them no problem (rootsh to go first of course).

I dont know if speed has improved or not, but here I noticed something good: i launched the media player and started listening to songs, and browsed few websites like wired.com, gmail.com (full version), and the most processing intensive google wave, and there was no feel that anything was slow. My earlier experiences have been that media player skipped when i used to be browsing, but this time it kept playing smoothly.

So it was a good experience overall, although few hours were scary ..

wish u all good luck updating

Ps: writing this on my freshly flashed and shiny n900, showing 75mb on / !!