Ok, I wasn't trying to write a review, but I'll try to be more specific

Symbian^3 system tray...

Status messages and Icons seem to be pretty inconsistent, e.g. the wifi 'antenna'? icon is incredibly tiny, while the battery icon is a significantly larger 'outline' of a battery... and the actual battery life is indicated by (larger) bars next to the battery icon, instead of the battery icon being filled in to a particular level? Or maybe the bars on the right are the wifi signal strength... not sure.

Also, after using the N8 for ~ 30 minutes, the web browser and home screens seemed to be stuck in portrait mode, even though I don't recall adjusting any settings to lock the screen into portrait mode. Similar issue with the media player... I saw album art in portrait mode, but never saw landscape mode album art. On the other hand, the virtual keyboard behaved as expected, switching between portrait and landscape, depending on rotation of the screen.

Next, getting at various settings seemed a bit random, e.g. couldn't tell if some were settings controlled by the current phone 'profile' (normal, indoors, meeting, etc...) or if some settings were buried in some of the other global? 'settings' dialogs.

What else? Interesting use of 'back', 'done', 'cancel', and 'exit' in various dialogs... where coming from an N900, you get the urge to just click/touch outside of the active dialog to dismiss a prompt, rather than clicking cancel, back, done, etc... to get out of particular settings.

I also got multiple 'new voicemail' notifications in the hour I was using the N8 (on T-Mobile USA), but I didn't actually have any voicemail, after humoring the notification and actually checking for voicemail multiple times.

Let's see... I can appreciate that the 'conversations' idea and unified inbox on the N8 might be fancy compared to a very basic cell phone, but the N900 does conversations, contacts, and message notifications far better.

Finally, when I found the Settings -> Phone -> Delete and Restore option to wipe the settings and data and restore to factory defaults, there was a nag about dropping my connections before it would do the delete/restore... so I disconnected wifi, and it would keep reconnecting to wifi... and rather than searching for auto-connect options to reset the phone, I decided it was faster to filter the N8 wifi MAC on my wireless router

Again, I wasn't really attempting a thorough review, because my impression of the N8 was more about feelings of mourning and shock... and... can't believe they scrapped Maemo and kept... umm... this?!?!?! WTF?!?!

I suppose I could be persuaded to believe that Symbian^3 is a significant improvement on previous Symbian releases, and maybe people coming from very basic phones will appreciate the N8... but I think N900 owners will be burdened with knowing that Symbian^3 is still pretty weak compared to Maemo5 on the N900.

I also thought about waiting for the E7 to get a physical keyboard, but my feeling on that now is... a physical keyboard will hardly bridge the gap between Symbian^3 and Maemo5... and I'm more likely to get a spare N900 than buy a Symbian^3 device now.