my advice is to spend this next week looking at what you use your phone for most. be logical. for example my needs are:
must have good call quality and signal quality because i spend a lot of time talking on the phone.
The battery must be decent enough to last a whole day with med/heavy use.
if it has no physical keys it must have a good vkb because i'm a heavy txter.
i do use the web on the go so good browser.
i need a decent email client.
i IM through skype frequently
it has to be able to multi task as i tend to have multiple things going eg browser, conversations and notes.

lots of phones can fit that bill for me. some are better in some area's then others. if i take all my usages and needs and then weigh up phones that look decent and i like i'll see what fits me.
you don't owe nokia or google or any company anything. don't be convinced by zealots from the different camps. Base your choice on what you do with it and how it feels for you. i go into the phone shop and test out new phones all the time to see if i like them.

the other dimension is around not what you use but how you use them. N900 made the experience pleasant - hit empty space to go back, one button to display all open apps etc

So, the key question, how is the browser in android? As good as the one in the n900?? And how is multitasking? Why is it fake?

I know that both questions in the iphone are easily answered with a "bad or really bad" and "not multitasking, but a workaround that works well most of the times but extremely annoying when you want to close apps"

Well. I'm a long time Linux and Open Source fan, so I don't think i'll be buying a Windows Phone or an iPhone.

Like petrelli I don't want to switch phone every 6 or 8 mouth, but wait at least a year or maybe a year and a half.

The reason why I've looked at the Nexus Prime was the clean, fresh and long time Android updates, but I still miss the psychical keyboard.

In Denmark where I live the only Android smartphones available with physical keyboard (as far as I know) is the HTC Disire Z that's kinda old now and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro that's ok cheap.
Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro is not that popular which means that very few (or no at all) custom roms will be available and if I know Sony right there will only be released very few and late official updates and will it even get Ice Cream Sandwich?
So then we're back to step 1. Maybe I should just keep my N900 as my primary phone.

But thanks for your toughs guys. It's nice to see the Maemo community still kicking and alive

You mad, bra? You seem to believe that everybody is Kangal....

Personally I'll stay with my (second) N900 for now. N9 would be awesome but it's twice the price I'd pay for the hardware that is built in. My ideal phone would be 4.x" with 720p screen (non-pentile subpixel arrangement), dual-core cpu, 1GB+ ram.

It's a shame that there are so many android phones with such great hardware and the n9 keeps struggling behind with almost the same cpu as the N900 and a pentile screen while it's still too expensive.

The last time I used Android at daily basis was about a year ago (Version 2.2)
The web browser is okay. It's very mobile orientated. You'll get the mobile version of websites (if they have any) and the default web browser is quite limited as far as I remember, so you won't the the Firefox-like real web experience you know from Nokia N900.

What I mean with "fake multitasking" is that every time you switch to a new app it'll atomically close the old app and save the state and when you go to "Last used apps" and open an app it'll reopen the app form it's previous state.

That's the case of multitasking Android 3.0 Honeycomb (for tablets) and I think that Android 4 will handle it the same way.

In Maemo 5 (N900) and Harmattan (N9 & N950) it's real multitasking. You have an overview of your current open apps and can choose to close them when you want to.

As far as I know the iPhone is really bad at multitasking and the jailbreaked workarounds shouldn't work that great as far as I know.

But I think that an iPhone owner can give you a better answer on that

i doubt we will see another phone like the n900 for years to come if ever. they way it multi-tasked, how open and configurable it is, xterm out of box. for me it was the last of the open phones. the n9 is pretty closed compared to it but you could tell that was what nokia were going to do to compete, companies like to have control and so do phone operators. unless there's a revolution from the consumer and they choose not to support the closed devices i don't see a mass market opensource phone that is as open as the n900. i will be getting another phone, probably the n9 to prolong the life of my n900.

I'm under the impression that ICS's main point is to stop the fragmentation between manufacturers(ie. when a new version of Android is released, you wouldn't need to wait that your phone's manufacturer brings its own version of it, if it even will bring it) and combining phone(Gingerbread) and tablet(Honeycomb) Androids together.

So in other words: if you want to know what ICS phones are more or less going to be like, see Honeycomb. Or...?

what happened to your N9?