I'm looking for a mobile device to use for work, and am thinking of an N9 because of how much I've liked past versions of Maemo...but I'm having trouble getting a sense of how robust the Exchange support is compared to other devices/OSes out there? I've searched and found a fair number of complaints, but I haven't been able to tell if those complaints are failures of the client, or if they are because the user has a unique setup that might not be fully supported.

So how good is Exchange support and the email client?

Are contacts fully synced and available locally, including all extra fields and description (most of my contacts will have things like assistant information, multiple phone numbers, and decent amount of notes)

Is it possible to sync multiple Exchange calendars (I have my own, plus a shared group calendar, and a third that is populated via an iCal feed)

Full folder support (including nested folders)?

Any support for categories?

Anything else I should know about the email client and Exchange? If the default email client is lacking, are there others available that are more fully featured?

Some answers;

You can have several calendars, at least if you have several accounts that can be contacted with individual password and account-name. I haven't found any way to add shared mailboxes to my own account's settings though.

Folders support is good. Includes nested ones.

There is quite a lot of different extra fields, but they stay empty, at least if you use search for contacts from Exchange's address book. The ones that get synced and that are specific to my account (own contacts that can seen from Outlook) have more information in them.

There is no better Exchange client for N9 as there are no others. Compared to default Android Exchange client or even Windows Phone one, I prefer N9 one because of a very good calendar client (and that company directory search works too, unlike in Android).

I haven't tested client called Touchdown on Android though. You may want to check that before making any decisions... I have no experience on iPhone email client either.

Thanks. Very much appreciate your answers. One other question, I keep reading about people using MfE along with Gmail as an intermediate step to sync things like contacts...I assume this is because they don't have an actual Exchange server they are hooking up to and are maybe doing this as a workaround for some other source? It hasn't been clear from the posts I've read, but I read it often enough that I wanted to make sure that wasn't needed for connecting directly to Exchange.

I haven't much experience with the iPhone email client, but I've used the default mail client on Android (not very good) and Touchdown (excellent from the little bit I used it, but that was about 2 years ago)

People use MfE with google account, because contacts in google account are not synced using google account. You have to use google's MfE contact support to get google contacts.

So different use case of what you're adding about.

Thanks. I had thought it was something like that, but wasn't able to find confirmation in anything I read, so wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding.

I use my N9 for work and sync is just fine against Exchange. Contact & Calendar handling for my own account is good - i don't use delegated access or shared Calendars. Online searching for contacts in the GAL is nice & seamless. OTA Contact synching is good & does not cause the duplication issues you could get with Ovi/Nokia Suite. Using the Organiser Feed app to get Calendar & To-Do's feeds onto the Home Screen works well too.