Tiago,

Is there any smart-phone out there that could possibly satisfy your needs?

@Zimon

No I'm not planning a hardware hack but a software hack.

A compass can be implemented by software.

I've found out that the strength of the FM-Signal of radio stations depends on the direction.

This is enough to define a local direction.

In a first step you will have to calibrate (indicate north) manually.

In a second step this calibration can be done automatically by the GPS information when you are moving.

Ah, while we're at it, add a picoprojector that can double as a RGB laser pointer.

gsever, it's not about the destination but the journey

@Tiago,

It is hard to be Nokia these days

It is in GPSJinni. Get a lock and take some walk. You can easily get the bearing that way.

That fake compass shows the direction you moved but doesn't point to that direction unless you hold the device in the corrct position

Regarding that Sygic thing: You DON'T have to buy anything, and you don't need Sygic. There's at least two Open Source (and obviously free) programs available which do voice navigation. Navit and Mappero. Navit is best downloaded through the instructions quoted in the first post on page 47 of the Navit for N900 thread, so it's not AS convenient as the Mappero for installing, but Mappero doesn't have internal routing, so you need internet connection to get a route (but you can save it for later as a built-in option).

And eSpeak is flexible, so I'm pretty sure you can download your own voices, or record yourself, if you really don't like the default one.

(I wrote a bunch of other stuff, but it was in quick reply, I didn't copy the text before hitting post, and apparently I got logged out in the meantime, so I'm not retyping. But the gist was "N900 barely has any disadvantages; here's a list of counter claims against what other people called disadvantages; here's my meager list of things I don't like, etc")

One more thing: Multitouch would be nice, but one, I feel that swirl to zoom should be a universal gesture, and it should never be replaced with ONLY the option to use the pinch gesture. Have you tried pinching one-handed? No, you have to get the other hand over there, or do some possibly-spasm inducing finger/hand positioning to do a pinch gesture if your other hand is taken (For those who don't get what I meant: You can't HOLD the phone in hand A and also pinch for hand A, without a rather uncomfortable hand maneuver, unless your fingers are unnaturally long and dexterous. The actual GESTURE is a one-handed thing, but that same one hand can't comfortably be the hand holding the phone). The N900's swirl gesture is in my eyes better simply because you can JUST use your thumb. HOWEVER, unlike some people, I actually realize different people have different preferences, so if it were me, pinch and swirl would both be included in an OS's UI, and you can toggle each one on-off (but not just between one or the other. You should be able to have both on or both off, if you so please).

Anyway, quick note: I played with some people's iPhones and Androids lately (3GS and 4, and Motorola Droid respectively), and I must say, I'm not loving capacitive screens. I already had that opinion for a while, but its doubly true now that I've felt them for prolonged periods. Multitouch is nice, but I say it's not worth the loss of precision, and the ability to have your touch (with only conductive parts of your body, mind) register at the slightest feather-like graze is a disadvantage rather than advantage, in my opinion. I like being able to point to something on the screen, or brush something off, or just stroke my finger across the screen, without it registering as a touch, and when I touch, I want it to register where I poked, not register approximately where I poked but with infintesimally less effort. (Which is something I noticed on iPhone 3GS especially. iPhone 4 and Droid weren't as bad about it, but it wasn't N900-esque precision.) Multitouch would be nice, but until someone (Stantum or otherwise) puts out resistive multitouch screens for phones, it's not worth it in my opinion.

Any GPS transceiver can determine a north-south bearing, but that doesn't make it in any way usable for apps (i.e. augmented reality).

• I know my N900 and its USB port may part ways at some point. That event would make me sad.
• I need to find quiet spots to make phone calls as the earpiece speaker isn't very loud. Happily for me, I only rarely make calls.
• I've given up on the camera flash altogether. The reflected glare from the camera back kills photos.
• I wish the screen were as large as the ones in my N800 and N810. Then use my N810 for a bit and wonder how I was happy carrying a device so large and heavy in my pocket all day every day. I think I want an even smaller device with an even bigger screen. And maybe a pony.
• There's no spell checker in the browser. There's not even an optional add-on as there was under Chinook. (And under Diablo, if you could convince the Chinook add-on to install properly there.)
• I'd like the option to disable double-tap to zoom in the browser and the ability to rearrange icons in the application launcher. I've never had reason to trigger either of those actions deliberately.
• I wish Nokia's Maemo developers were mystical, magical beings and thereby could have given us PR1.3 as PR1.0. I was happy with PR1.0 when that's what we had, but PR1.3 is far more refined. A year of updates on top of it? That would have been fantastic.

I expect you will quickly adjust should you buy the phone. Prior to the phone's release, the position of the space bar was a common complaint by those considering purchase, but it's not one I've seen mentioned by those who have owned the phone for even a little while. And we've had some posters pound out some quite thorough laundry lists of complaints about their N900s.