Judging a device based on which carrier sells it directly is a bit silly.

Its only logical, the networks would much rather we bought dumb phones with huge amount of bundled minutes and texts, as they make more money that way. The more powerful the phone, the less likely you will need to make calls or texts, as you have e-mail and the whole Internet to contact people with far cheaper.

For a start, T-Mobile never sold the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 which is why I had to get it on O2, a huge mistake as the handset was poorly designed and O2 reception is the shite. The networks always pick and choose handsets, they want the ones which they can charge the most but support the least.

The N900 is their worst nightmare, as people will be demanding support left and right, because its missing features people expected it to have plus it works somewhat different to other handsets. The N97 however, I suspect its as someone said above, it needed a lot of firmware tweaking to work right so networks which like to customise their firmware will not be happy, as its more work for them each time a new firmware comes out. It might be cheaper to ditch it than support it. Although personally I believe they are wrong, because you don't gain customer loyalty leaving them with old buggy firmware versions, but then I think all the networks are equally rubbish in the UK for that, so what choice do you have if they all suck compared to the updates you get buying a phone outright?

Its really quite sad that today rather than trying to beat your competition, everyone is instead all trying to drop to the same poor level of support so that it no longer makes any difference, they all suck.