My N900 randomly died this morning. I was using DUN over bluetooth to tether my laptop for Internet access (something I have done many times before) and then, suddenly, the bluetooth connection died. I checked my N900 and it was off, so I tried to turn it on, and nothing happened. The battery was full as I had charged it overnight.

To be clear, I am not using any testing or development software, just official and maemo extras.

After unplugging the battery, waiting, trying again, and a whole bunch of other fiddling, I decided, out of desperation, to attempt a reflash of my N900.

Following the instructions for Updating the tablet firmware, I grabbed the flasher and a copy of the latest firmware. Being the sort of person that I am, before actually reflashing, I fired off

The -R option caught my eye so I held down 'u' on my N900 keyboard, connected it by USB and fired off

A few moments later, my N900 rebooted and came back to life. I was presented with the localization selection screen on boot but, after that, everything was as it had been with all settings and software intact.

Moral of the story, if your N900 randomly bricks, you might want to consider a board reboot before you consider re-flashing. Of course, if you've actually flummoxed your system, a hard reboot isn't going to accomplish anything.

Interesting. It's very rare that N900's just randomly die of their own accord as yours apparently did, I'd be very curious to know what could have happened to it that a flasher reboot cleared but a cold boot after a battery pull didnt.