Life with my Nokia N900

I've been running around with my N900 for a good time, now, and I have a better idea of its pluses and minuses. Time to share!

The Good:
Sound Quality: It's a Nokia, and it shows. Calls are crystal clear, the sound is perfect, and when the ring tones start blasting, it feels like the ghetto is on tour.
Screen Resolution: Seriously, I've used a BlackBerry and an iPhone, and I pity the poor fellas that continue using them. In particular, using the pinch-zoom on an iPhone is just about the most annoying thing in the world, because you constantly have to do it. Nah, get yourself an N900 and see the world with new eyes.
Extensibility: Yep, it doesn't have as many apps as the iPhone or even Android, but it's much easier to write new ones and to make old ones work on it. I tried it myself - after the frustrating experience of setting up cross-compilation, I actually got tcpdump compiled and installed and had a ton of fun seeing it work. There is just something about having a full environment to work with that is special.
Speed: It's zippy, alright? It's zippy enough that you immediately know when you are sent from WiFi to GPRS, because all of a sudden the browser can't keep up with you. As long as you are running on the little device, things are FAST.
Browser: Hello, Firefox! I got so frustrated with all the sites that don't work properly in Opera Mini, WebKit, or BlackBerry. On the N900, all sites WORK. It's just like sitting in front of your desktop and using your browser there. (Notable exception recorded later).
Skype Integration: A wonderful idea! You register your Skype account (whether online only or offline, too) and you get all your Skype calls into the regular phone mode. You can't really even tell the difference between Skype and regular calls, both inbound and outbound.

The Bad:
Battery Life: Sucks. As bad as the iPhone. If I stay out of the house for more than 8 hours, it dies on me. Grrrr...
OVI Software: One of the only things I absolutely regret is that Google Maps doesn't work in the browser. The navigation conflicts with the screen gestures for the browser itself. I wouldn't mind if the Maps from Nokia were anywhere near Google, but they are just pretty, but useless. I got tons more mileage out of my BlackBerry without GPS than with the N900 with. OVI Maps feels like it was written in the last Millennium, cumbersome, devoid of features, and quite clueless as to what you want from a mapping software.
Buggy: The bugs are right where you'd least expect them, and they are such that the experience is really unnecessarily hindered. For instance, for some mysterious reason, the phone refuses to show me who's calling half the time. I found a workaround: popping the keyboard open forces the phone app in landscape mode, which shows me all the info - but what do you do with a phone that displays precisely nothing when a call comes in?
Inconsistent: A phone that is open has one immense possibility, that of creating a hub of information. Incoming streams can be displayed alongside each other, filtered by source, by type, by urgency, whichever way you want. Not so in the N900. For instance, I use Pidgin for instant messaging - and despite the fact that IM is available through Skype in the main phone app, the messages that I get on Pidgin are somewhere completely different than those that come from Skype. This is kept throughout the phone: the contact entries are stored in a Berkeley DB, while the browser properties are stored in SQLite databases. That's all unnecessary: create a consistent architecture and work on all apps supporting it.

The Ugly:
Keyboard: Sorry, people, an Internet tablet that has a slider keyboard but doesn't support bluetooth or USB keyboards is plain dumb. It's not that it's bad, it's just stupid.  Once I learned to use the on-screen keyboard, I've never used the slider (except for those keys that are not available on the O-SK). The keys are too tiny, don't have enough feedback, and are in general too icky. If I could shave 1/3 of the height of the device by removing the keyboard, man would I be ecstatic! (Why bluetooth keyboard are declared "not a priority," is a mystery to me. Especially because in the pre-N900 tablets, they worked perfectly well.)
Gizmos: The camera is nice and well-integrated, so kudos for that. Everything else, though, seems to be half-assed. There is a webcam, for instance, but the picture quality is abysmal under low-light conditions, and there is no support in any meaningful app. To mock all of us, the only one that actually seems to work in bright light is "Mirror," which shows you to yourself. Cool? Not so much.
I mentioned lack of USB host support. That means that, while you have a fully competent Linux machine, the USB connector is crippled. You could print over the network, for instance, but you can't over the USB port. You could use an external webcam, but you can't connect it. I am not sure whether the problem is with the hardware (lack of USB host support on the controller) or the software, but in either case, the lack of functionality is maddening.
USB Port: Nokia, is it that hard to use standard connectors? Why on earth do we need a non-standard port to connect a USB device? Just give us a phone with a standard USB mini port, like the BlackBerries. It's not just that I don't want to carry one more cable with me - it's that if I am somewhere without the cable, there is no way I will find a Nokia connector at the nearest 7/11 - but I will almost certainly find a USB mini cable.
MeeGo: Did you hear the latest? Nokia merged its Maemo efforts with Intel's Moblin, and now they are MeeGo. Everything changes, nothing stays the same. Oh, and since Nokia bought Trolltech, you'll have to switch from Gtk to Qt for development. I hate saying this, but every time you force a change of infrastructure on people, you lose more developers willing to develop for you. It was true with Windows CE, which frustrated me to no ends with its incessant change of APIs, and it's true for these phones, too.
Cost: Seriously, Nokia. There is ONE phone that runs Maemo. It's the N900. It's freaky expensive. Give us something that a college kid could use on a shoestring budget. It's perfectly pointless to give us a Rolls Royce and expect the open source community to work with it. Know Thy Audience!