I ended up with a fake because even though I'm kind of a geek, I don't do much on ebay or buy Gucci on street corners.... So I didn't even realize I had to worry about that. Somebody was selling a "Nokia N900" so I thought it was a Nokia N900. Seems stupid in retrospect. Presumably, I'll be smarter next time. It was only when nothing worked right that I began wondering whether maybe I'd been sold a locked machine as unlocked. That didn't make sense, because I'm in the US and nobody here provides locked N900s with a contract, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong. So then I started searching goog for the IMEI and other numbers and found out.

Now that I know more about it, I realize that the main menu was all wrong too. It did have the Nokia-handshake welcome screen though, so they were trying . . .