A lot of wow...

The whole desktop experience is awesome and smooth, the email client and the browser are great, skype out of the box and the whole integration of contacts is sweet...

And for the more geeky side of me: opening the appication manager to find out application stores are really deb repositories... ssh, terminal, and TI emulator...

I think my biggest 'wow moment' thus far was yesterday when I used my n810 for a little while. I'd been relatively disappointed with my typing speed on the n900 because of the new layout, which had kept me from noticing how great the keyboard really was- the 810 (which I always loved) felt terrible in comparison. A little more practice on the 900 will probably have me even faster than I was on the larger keyboard.
I've been pretty impressed with the new one thus far. Vncviewer works well (though I need to get rid of the toolbar in fullscreen mode), rdesktop works fine, openssh is openssh...I'm quite happy with Conversations/haze (though I've missed file transfer).
SIP seems to work well with Gizmo but my work asterisk account is acting up (probably something on my end; I'll have a look at that when I get a chance).
I've been scrambling around trying to figure out how to set up bluetooth NAP, but I haven't been able to find much useful information. Finally ran across some promising pages from a gentoo user last night, so hopefully I'll work it out shortly.
I'm looking forward to getting dialcentral/TheOneRing working, but using the GV page is OK for now.

See my post here:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=37094

I wanted a great software (Mercurial) which hasn't already been ported to Maemo 5/N900.
I just had to set up the Scratchbox, build the software there and dump the files on my N900 !

Granted, this is just a command-line utility but still.
It reveals that everything is made to help the developer and not to obstruct him.

I'd be curious to see how hard it would be to do that on iPhone OS or Android.

The biggest wow was the great integration with IM. The integrated inbox for both text messages and IM chats.. lovely..

However, the email client needs an overhaul..

The best was when I found a text on the manual stating "You can develop on your own phone" (something on those lines).

At last a developer was seen as a user.

An overhaul... now don't be modest

I think it needs to be reimplemented from scratch. The existing email client is absolutely horendous. The fact that my Inbox disappears when I click into my email accounts...



Where'd my Inbox go?? and then 15 ~ 30 seconds later it appears!
Simply unusable in my opinion. If this thing is positioned as an Internet tablet, I bloody well think accessing my Inbox should be instantaneous. It is caching emails locally right? Not going to the server every time to fetch my Inbox.

Use easy debian for things like this. MUCH easier.

... as a newbie to smart phones I can safely say I'm blown away by pretty much everything my n900 does ... my "wow" moment really does have to be the browsing experience tho ... the touchscreen and browser combine to make surfing the web an absolute joy, tis rarely necessary to zoom even to select the smallest links... and the fonts are rendered so beuautifully even tiny text is easy on the eye...

I'm not really sure what I was expecting but I don't think I was expecting everything to be so easy... setting things just the way I want has been a breeze and I now have a phone that's just right for me ... very glad I waited for the n900 I don't think I'd have been anywhere near as happy with anything else ...

rdesktop-cli - and seeing a W2K3 login screen in front of me was my biggest "wow" up to now...

"WOW...I can adjust power level in WiFi radio to save battery."

"WOW...this calendar is nicer than other smartphone calendars, but I don't know why."

"WOW...I don't "have" to download any apps to get all the functionality I want (a la the DROID...except for Sling/HAVA player, and LED flashlight).

"WOW...this screen is nowhere near as crappy as I thought it would be."

"wow...Flash based sites work really well, but the embedded media players don't always play smoothly, or may not be supported at all...DOH!"

"WOW...after charging for second time, the USB receptacle came out of the phone when pulling out the power plug."