I still use my N8 for quick pics. Be ready to be a bit disappointed by N9's camera. Although, you'd love it for the speed.

Harmattan = pure win. If you love tweaking around and being the controller of the phone, you'll enjoy it.

but everyone already told you that.. I'm just confirming it

FasterN9 and N9QuickTweak should be the two first applications you wanna look for to get started. Then of course comes Wazapp.. Our own lovely WhatsApp soup xD

aaaand.. The conceited but helpful community is always here to help!

The N9 has absolutely STUNNING macros (beats the N8 in that department) and better video capture.

The auto-focus in N9's video is perfect. The N8 does not have that good auto focus in videos. It changes focus way slower than N9.

Yes, my N900 is not running the latest kernel. It does not sport the portrait-mode enhancements of CSSU. It is not overclocked, isn't using a customized swap system, nor utilizing the significant advantages of the Thumb command set.

So what?

I have no problem using it as my cell phone. I can listen to my podcasts and stream NPR with no problems. My videos play just fine. I can open a terminal and mess around with "vim" to my heart's content. The machine makes a wonderful playground for my own little apps (such as Pierogi).

In short, the N900 already does absolutely everything I want in a portable device, without me changing a single thing. Yes, it is not as fast as the latest crop of mobile devices; but if that is your only grievance, you'd be ditching your current cell phone every three or four months as the latest and greatest device appears on the market...

Choose what suit you best, no neex to argue,

This is the key factor here.

CSSU is recommend to people due to it's updates. More and more applications will start to depend on CSSU due to the added features coming through.
Also bear in mind that CSSU also provides bugfixes for things Nokia CBA fixing.

I am not knocking anybody who wishes to use PR1.3 but explaining why it's the first thing recommended on the forum.

Also I wish it would stop being promoted as "portrait mode".
Just because it's the only obvious feature*, it doesn't mean CSSU isn't a lot more than that.

* it isn't really a feature anyway

Sorry to veer a bit off-topic here, but let me put in my 2 cents on the CSSU:

Er, yeah. It has updates. Lots and lots of updates. A vast quantity of updates, certainly. Every time I asked about the updates, I was pointed to the changelog. Every time I ask someone to explain the contents of the changelog in greater detail, I get told to just look up the patches themselves in the source code. (I did actually start to do that back in January. Not all patches appeared to be 100% improvements. One even looked rather dangerous. I'm hoping to get back to more analysis of the CSSU eventually...)

And this always leaves me scratching my head as well. Yes, the CSSU supports Qt's latest gui front-end (Qt Quick). So apps that depend on Qt Quick won't run without it. But, why do I want to use Qt Quick to begin with? I already know C++. Qt Quick only provides me a non-C++ way to access a subset of Qt's abilities, and then use those abilities on the subset of Qt platforms that support Qt Quick.

By writing my code in straight-up Qt, an app like Pierogi can do more than it could with Qt Quick, as well as run on both CSSU and non-CSSU N900s...

Yes! I keep hearing that. I would love to know exactly what those bugs are, and how well they've been fixed. That should be the first thing shown to people who click on the CSSU icon on the upper right side, something to convince them exactly what their non-CSSU device is missing, and how horribly their lives will be lacking if they don't install CSSU this very minute.

The problem here is that, among the scanty CSSU documentation available, the most comprehensive item is the hildon-desktop upgrades, which mostly involve new transitions and new portrait options. Hopefully, the documentation will improve. (I'll try to work on it again myself, once I get a little more free time...)

Yes I agree the documentation is poor, I would help but I don't know where to start.

FYI, that wiki page was compiled by me, merging several out of date wiki's and adding a lot of information from various posts and my knowledge.
I was playing with my transitions.ini at the time so I updated the wiki to reference to.
Hence it being the "most comprehensive"...

oh, i agree the N8's macros sometimes arent that good. I have a whale of a job sometimes getting it to focus on the right object / being exactly the right distance from it.

I'll probably keep both of them on me, and whip out the N8 when i think i need to - until i suss out how to use the N9's camera well enough. I think i may really miss the camera button *wibble*

The N8 indeed has problems with very close distances.
N9 can focus from very very close. Not even N8 can match it.

Of course on other departments (and night photos), N8 wins.

But the N9 is by no means a "dissapointment" in photography/video. It's more than decent (in day).

**yes, you'll miss the camera button.

wait till early next year to decide, see what the bb10 handsets look like