The thing that irks me about the N900 is that there are some things it doesnt do particularly well, and quite a few things it does spectacularly badly..

For the most part, I wish I'd stuck with a symbian phone. There are things I really like about the N900, but it's not a device I'd jump ship to. I program computers for a living, but I rarely open Terminal on this device.


Be really honest with yourself as to what you want it to do. For the most part, coming from an evolved and brilliant phone like the 5800, the N900 will be a disappointment.. If not now, then 2 months down the line when you've filled it with junk and it's running like a dog

In apple's defence, their devices dont do much but what they do do, they do really well. My 32G ipod touch has 7000 songs on it and the UI flies. My N900 has the same 7000 songs on and I cant find a music player that will render the list in anything less than about a minute, if at all. Having to mess about with third party apps for MMS and USSD is a turn off. The GPS is great, but the Maps app is slow to update the screen and cannot be reasonably used for navigating in a car. I'm experiencing random stupidities now that there are several thousand messages in the phone (such as when tapping on a yellow notification it thinks for a while, then the Conversations app quits) and the pain I had to go through to get Mail For Exchange working wasnt worth the waste of my life. The fact that there's no T9, and the device is useless/unusable in one hand is another major sour for me.
All the points mentioned above are done better by the 5800. The one thing this phone does that is brilliant and not done by the 5800 is the way Conversations provides a consistent UI to IM and SMS and the default protocol support out of the box. This is let down by the fact that the virtual keyboard is a complete turd and receiving any SMS or IM jams the whole phone up for several seconds while it works out how to render the yellow swooshing notification.

Take a really hard look at what you use your 5800 for and how you use it.. I can understand the argument about carrying a computer in your pocket.. A supernerd would love such a thing and forgive all it's faults (the major one being it's SLOW) but the rest of us would probably just carry a netbook when we want to and a phone like the 5800 that actually fits in a pocket - the phone does the phone stuff really well, the netbook does the computer stuff really well.. The N900... doesnt really do either very well

If you want slick and are prepared to sacrifice your ultimate flexibility buy a different device