Somehow I do not understand your problem. Pressing numbers if you dial is straight forward on the N900. Nothing special, nothing different than on other phones. Looking up a contact during phone call: How do you want to make it different? You would need a kind of set off device if you do not want to switch to loudspeaker. There is no other way that I know: switch to loudspeaker, ask your telephone partner if she/he still hears you (which is nearly always the case since the microphone and loudspeaker of N900 are very good, except if background noises are too loud), background phone application, look up contact in adress book, tell your telephone partner (or send an email), tell your telephone partner that you have to switch off loudspeaker, foreground telephone application, switch off loudspeaker, proceed normally with phone call. I do not see a problem here and I do not see, how other phones would make this different or even with phone near ear. I do not understand...there is the phone icon in the status bar. So you know you are still phoning. Is this different on your N900? I have the impression that there is something wrong with your N900. ;-) Misconfigured somehow? ;-) Of course I'd like a 2nd use for e.g. camera button when phoning which selects an application by voice control and selects an entry within that application (in this case a calendar entry) and reads it to the telephone partner on the other end of line. But even this would be odd for your telephone partner and it would be a matter of procedure and not of technical issues. I never heard of such a feature on other smartphones.