Previous phones I've owned (such as the N95) would give you the option to choose between full unicode support - and the extra footprint that comes with it - and just using "extended character set", which I guess was something like Latin-1 using 8 bit characters. For "regular" languages such as French, Spanish or German, the latter would be sufficient.

Does anyone know if the N900 has a similar setting anywhere? I had a quick look but couldn't find it...