I bought the N900 as soon as it was released in the US. I had been waiting for it since I got my N810, which I instantly fell in love with. The N900 was great out of the box, but over the next 4 months I became increasingly disappointed with it. I even changed from AT&T to TMobile because I wanted 3G data. The Maemo platform is still incredibly immature as anything other than a hobbyist/developer platform. As a smartphone it's nearly useless. And Nokia did nothing but pay lip service to the platform after launch. I say this as a long time Nokia fan and Maemo booster. I jumped to Android, the Nexus One, and haven't missed my N900 for a second.
Not only does the software platform suffer from terribly integration and missing features, the hardware itself is poorly designed. The slide mechanism is cheap, and wound up putting scratches into the right side of the keyboard area. There is a magnet on the OUTSIDE of the battery cover that performs two actions. It helps hold down the useless kickstand (it's positioned too far to one side to reliably keep the N900 upright if you play on touching it) when the kickstand is closed, AND it also triggers a sensor on the phone so it knows the battery door is closed. When that magnet falls off, the phone won't mount the SD card because it thinks the battery door is open. The only solution is to go to Nokia warranty and have them send you a new back.
If you lose the stylus, Nokia won't even SELL you a new one. They sell them to warranty service centers, but PEOPLE can't get them.
Nokia has completely lost any clue they had how to satisfy customers anymore. They keep putting out great designed phones with Symbian, a dead OS (don't even tell me how awesome it still is, it's not. It's a dead OS that no one told is dead. iOS, Android, even WinMoPhoneCE 7 is better than Symbian.), and crappy hardware with a POTENTIALLY fantastic OS, Maemo. And then they decided to merge Moblin with Maemo. It'll never take off, any chance it had is dead. Meego is the new Taligent. And the N900 is just dead in the water.
I really really really don't want to lose my faith in humanity because of this...
Oh, come on over, having no faith in humanity isn't that bad. Life's great when you are at peace with the knowledge that at least global warming will obliterate mankind now that we've managed to muck up nuclear annihilation by disarming.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan