I found the n900 to be

- great for media (eg watching/listening to movies/music/ebooks)
- good for 5MP photography with an excellent carl zeiss branded flash
- high quality screen resolution, good for reading/browsing from
- excellent slide out keyboard (a must, esp for large fingers or fast typing-one reason why ill be avoiding the N8, as im pretty sure the initial N8s wont be featuring one)
- price of the n900 will be set to drop much lower soon after the N8 is released, so you might want to wait if you dont want to waste cash!

Im quite fussy when it comes to noticing the downside on what I buy, so :-

- although the signal is good, I found call quality to be much lower than my cheapest ever mobile (that was around the $20 mark)!
- screen tearing with scrolling software/games to be an annoyance
- fairly poor/jerky video when recording from the camera, certainly not up to the same standard as its photo quality
- much shorter battery life when comparing to my last sony/samsung mobiles, having to charge the n900 almost every day
- my mains adapter eventually gave up, although USB via the pc worked fine for charging my n900
- price of the n900 will be set to drop much lower after the N8 is released