Sorry for all of the pedantic prattle you are getting here in addition to good answers. For some reason, people on this thread want to debate the fine print of Nokia ads at every opportunity, and ***** about the delay in getting the latest update. I find it all greatly entertaining, and it keeps me coming back to the forums!

In any case, whenever the phone rings, no matter what you are doing (including looking at the list of applications that are open on the "multitasking screen") you can answer it. The phone app pops up and overrides everything so you can answer.

If you get an sms, you get a yellow alert box that pops up over what you are doing. You can see the text of the message (not sure if it cuts off after a certain number of characters...nobody ever sends me long messages) for a few seconds and then it zooms away. The list of apps (the "multitasking screen" again) will now show an additional app which is a yellow box that says you have a message. You click on it and it takes you to the conversations with that contact, and you see the latest message listed there with the previous conversations you had with that person.

My only beef has been that (on a few extremely rare occasions) my phone slows down to a crawl, probably due to a buggy app from the development repositories that is hogging memory/processing. When this happens, and I get a phone call, sometimes the buttons are not responsive and I miss the call. This has only happened once or twice, and a reboot solves everything.

Oh...and T-Mobile craps out much more than AT&T did for me last year, so I occasionally cannot pick up a call due to that. But that's not the phone's fault.

In general, despite the raging debate over how Nokia marketed the gizmo, this is a phone. It rings, you answer it.