Hello Experts,

I need your opinion before making this purchase decision. I would greatly appreciate your help.

I have used a Lumia 800 for last 4 years with no complaints and my unconditional love and loyalty for the device (hardware) has brought me down to a decision point - another Lumia 800 or N9 ? I have been hearing a lot of praise for N9 and how people would not exchange it for anything else in the world and while Lumia 800 is great, I am inclined towards N9 because it is a totally unexplored territory for me. And it is the most beautiful phone ever. I have the following questions:

The following functions in a phone are of use to me -
1) making calls and texting
2) using whats app messenger (very important)
3) good signal and call quality - no call dropping and needing to shout
4) decent battery life
5) occasional maps, google search and youtube

THAT's IT. I am a happy man if I get these things.

1) Can I have an N9 and be happy in all above areas?
2) Can I successfully install whats app using the various open-source apps and the various ways of registering it as discussed on this forum?
3) Does the N9 demand flashing/tweaking/using rocket science to make it usable and enjoyable?
4) in which cases (for what requirements/ functionality does one need to do all the above developer stuff ?
5) On one hand they say MEEGO HARMATTAN is closed source and un-tweakable and on the other hand, I see hundreds on threads explaining how people change all sorts of things on an N9 - fonts, clock colors, apps which otherwse wouldn't install, 5 rows of icons and what not - so what exactly is the reality? Are all these changes possible on a Meego based N9 or first one needs to flash and then he is good to do all the experimentation?

Guys I sincerely apologize for this post - the size, immaturity and all aspects of it that would annoy you all. However, this is my 20th day since I lost my Lumia 800 and I am without a phone and I need to decide and order from China or Hong-Kong or wherever it would be available. So your opinions are much much appreciated.

Cheers.

It will fit your requirements pretty nicely though i have a dogy feeling for whatsapp going rouge someday
Other than that its the most beautiful phone i ever saw

You have obviously done your homework here but there are more obstacles in your way now setting up a new device with Nokia/Microsoft having closed Harmattan repositories, such as enabling developer mode when individual dependencies have to be installed. In some ways however QuickTweak and Coderus aegis installer hack have made life much simpler, but as a "daily driver" it will become increasingly frustrating. That said I keep an N9 handy as wouldn't be without Erudite (Kindle) reader, which doesn't function on my Nokia808!

+1, IMHO.

The one thing I know nothing about is the whatsit-thingy, otherwice you will be fine.

Tweaking it requires no flashing, except for until you get to pretty advanced stuff. And if/when you do, it is not that difficult.

On top of that, if you have willingness to learn new things, N9 will enable you to do that, for years to come, unlike Lumia 800 would.
If you are not into that kind of thing, you can just enjoy one of the very best & most beautiful mobile UI's ever created.

First of all, N9 is awesome, and true, i'll not trade it for anything else

1. Its a phone a great one, will do this. It lacks smart dial though
2. Sure. It has whatsup for that, which many will agree is in many ways better than official WhatsApp. But also a little unstable.
3. Call quality is good. No problem there.. The only problem i had with calls is that the earpiece is small. When i switched from C7(has a bigger earpice) to N9 i had some trouble positioning it against my ear. That's no problem now
4. It does have a decent battery life. I used to get around 3+ hrs of screen-on time along with 15+ hrs of idle time when i used it as my daily driver. Now that i don't, I get around 1+ hr screen-on along with 2+ days to total standby.
5. Maps is great on N9. But i wouldn't suggest browsing the net on N9. YouTube is also great with cutetube.

N9 doesn't play 720p videos, slows down sometimes and using whatsup for a long time eats up a lot of ram, and it gets laggy, a lot. But i cannot imagine leaving N9 just for these reasons. I've learnt many things about linux while exploring the N9. And the UI is the best i've used so far, love it.

In the end i would say that, if you are going to do mostly just this then N9 will do it, but lumia 800 might do it better. but there is a lot of stuff that N9 can do and lumia 800 cannot.

You probably forgot to mention that N9's stock music player is one of the best still. The Dolby support when using headphones, to me, is flawless. Not many cell phones out there can match N9 in that matter.

If you record videos, the stereo sound recording will astonish you while playing back. I don't see that in much phones out there too. I once used my DSLR for capturing picture and N9 to record audio and mixed them. I should say, I got a very decent reslut!

This is a device which would intrigue you. Many times, it can be not like 'press that button to do something' as in the Lumia, you might need to sweat a little. As pointed out in previous posts, no support for high profile HD videos might be frustrating when you just want to copy a file and play but not encode specially for the phone. All the functions you mentiones can be executed smoothly on the N9.

I do love the way how it taught me many thousands of things about open source, this community, linux, debian, mutual support, help and what not. Yeah, the design, 'the neat black slab', that is a million dollar design for a phone

Go for bb10, will suit all what you need, or an apple ��

The N9, is too slow for today and the battery life will be awful, compatively speaking. The L1520 goes 2 days easy and it is super fast.
P.s. I now use my N9 for music and Spotify, everytime I still look at it, I think, this is a beautiful phone.

I would buy 64 GB N9, but people are asking unbelievable price for used one. My old 16 GB N9 is slowly dying right now (some hardware problems), and allways running out of space (full of movies, photos and music). So i decided to go for my first Jolla, should get it on thursday, according to FedEx
So, YES for N9 64 GB, and probably NO for N9 16GB from my experience (only because lack of space).

I bought in March 2014 over Ebay a new one 64 GB N9. It was for arab country but it works fine. It was some over 375 USD i think.

The seller was from Chicago i think