Well, after the utterly rubbish Nokia Flasgship Store totally failed to produce a phone for me, I felt the pull of eBay. Cecil in Morden kindly sold me one of his two new N900s. The mark up was steep, but fair.

Travelling back on the tube, I put my SIM in, and fired up the phone. It booted. I entered the setup information - which was slick, and frankly the best experience I've ever had from a resistive touch screen.

Things then went down hill. Scrolling between the desktops was slow. Often the screen would get stuck between transitions. Tapping the screen would right the problem, but it felt beta and unfinished. It felt all too early N97.

I fired up the music player, and an XTerminal. Music quality was good to excellent, and according to 'top' MP3 decoding was taking up just 10% of CPU. Niiice...

But the N900 was being staggeringly unresponsive. Transitions jerked, and screen redraws were often incomplete.

I felt a sudden, enormous disappointment.

And then my device spontaneously rebooted. My heart continued to sink.

My goodness, what's this? Post reboot, I have a different device. The transitions are slick. The interface is responsive, even with music playing. Scrolls are good and responsive. My heart is lifting, fast.

I make a call, the quality is terrific, and the mike works (phew). I surf the web, and it works smoothly and well. Scrolls are seamless. Zooming is quick. This is a million times better an experience than the N97 or the Magic/Hero. That said, I don't seem to be able to get the clockwise/anticlockwise zoom to work. No big deal. The screen is absolutely stunning.

I play the demo video included. It looks terrific. I now have five or six apps running, and all remains responsive.

Guys: I don't know what it was about the first boot of the N900, but it was rubbish. If you have the same experience as me, don't suffer... reboot :-)

Reboot it again to see if you can get another speed improvement!

Maybe it's the indexing/search daemon that first loads it's initial DB?
(just guessing)