Battery life is a downside for sure, for me this is mitigated dramatically by the open nature of the device. I carry around a dc-11 charger 'just in case'. This is annoying, but a better option than ending up with a less capable phone thats content has to be approved by a manufacturer.

The open nature of the phone also leads to the dramatically different accounts people have of the very same features. Many people in this thread have said the phone aspect is rock solid. Personally, I miss 1 in five calls because the screen does not react when the call comes in. I generally put this down to having too many apps consuming memory and so something has to be swapped out of ram before the phone app can get enough resources to put up the UI.

Which leads to another point - the phone app is just an app. It isn't any more integral to the platform than any other application, like the browser or media player. In the main, this doesn't have much impact except in these types of instance where it competes for resources from other apps.

Ovi maps is disappointing. Flash video playback can be stuttery, depending what else is going on, but still far better than anything else out there (other than that one android phone referred to earlier).

I would say that this 'phone' requires a lot more management than you are used to. You need to keep an eye on cpu usage, memory usage. If you venture into development apps, you need to keep an eye on disk space usage (this is less of an issue than it used to be).

This is what I think frustrates so many people - they are used to using phones, and a phone is a phone. They look at other phones and compare them to the n900 and wonder at the differences. They wonder why a niche device like the n900 doesn't have the same hoards of businesses and developers churning out "cool apps". The less intellectually challenged can work through these conundrums and either realise they have purchased the wrong device and move on, or they work within the 'limitations' and take advantage of all the benefits. The rest become trolls and litter this forum with incomprehensible complaints about the ovi store, as if that mattered even slightly.

The n900 isn't a phone. It is a linux computer with a phone app.