gjoe, Just to share my battery life result:

I started using my N900 about 3 months ago, current battery life still approx 1day to 1.5days. WIFI is on 24hrs, 3G, average call usage, music and general tweaking around some applications. I don't save on applications and widgets (what's the point of having this great phone when you need to skim on the cool features, right?). I'm not familiar with tweaking the kernel stuffs (though I wish I did) so it's original settings mainly.

The N900 is a wonderful phone. I have no idea about development stuffs and I believe we have all the apps we need to download from here and Ovi store to maximize the phone capabilities. The rest of the competitor stuff is purely marketing.

I save all my music on the phone; it's now my primary camera; notes for all my research stuffs; other applications to entertain me. Great phone? So far the best I've used from Nokia.