I hope you guys won't hate me too much for this post, and please keep in mind I tore down my personal N900 trying to correct the broken USB connector for everybody. You can still see my attempt at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=45385 I loved the N900, and I was truly looking forward to the N9, hoping it would be at least as good or better. So I bought the first reasonably priced black 64Gb N9 phone I could find in my city. Keep in mind I'm in North America, and the N9 is not available from a carrier, every single one is imported and overpriced by a wide margin. And I promptly sold it after about 2 weeks. I am comparing the N9 (PR1.2) to the N900 (latest CSSU) and the HTC Sensation (ICS 4.0.3 Sense ROM), which is an older Android phone that is about half the price of the N9 16Gb. I also used extensively the HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy Nexus with different custom ROMS. INTRODUCTION Let me start by saying I love swipe. I think its revolutionary, and once you get used to it any other user interface feels clunky and outdated. The N9 excels at human interaction, at ease of use while retaining a fully multitasking environment. I fell in love with swipe the first time I used it. But swipe is useful in navigating between the things you do with the device, and this is the point of this review. Web browser: Compared to the N900, the N9 feels faster at loading and rendering pages, which I frankly expected since it's 2 years newer. But it lacks bookmarks (sorry, cluttering my application list with 30 bookmarks is NOT a good idea, and adding a folder requiring extra taps to access does not fix it). The N9 also lacks any kind of ad blocker, forcing me to resort to a custom hosts file, while the N900 had adblock available on the repositories. I also tried fennec on the N9, and it's incomplete with a very, very slow interface. Compared to the Sensation's stock browser, the N9's browser is a relic from a different era. Loading pages, rendering, scrolling are all immensely faster on the Sensation. No wonder, given that it's a dual core @1.5Ghz. But when the Sensation is under CAD$300 while I just sold the N9 for CAD$600, this is inexcusable. I do have to be honest here regarding ad blocking. The Sensation does not and cannot have it UNLESS you root the phone. But I have a feeling that is the first step many of us old N900 users would do anyway on any Android device. Also clicking links was an exercise in frustration on the N9. At default zoom it would consistently register taps on the wrong links. Even on this site I kept giving people thanks on random posts instead of clicking Next Page. I may be all thumbs, but the Sensation seems to guess correctly the vast majority of times. Virtual Keyboard: Clear winner by a long shot is the N900. Try as they may, the N9 and Sensation suck. That said, as far as as virtual keyboards go the Sensation wins, both in portrait and landscape mode. Just like clicking links, the N9 was consistently less precise than the Sensation. But it was also less precise than the HTC Desire which has a smaller screen. I won't argue the double function keys on the Sensation where a long press inserts a number or symbol thus saving a tap. That is a matter of preference, and the N9 keyboard design had its benefits. Navigation: Nokia did a great job here. I downloaded all the maps for North America from Nokia, and I could navigate using GPS positioning without using 3G. However, the Maps app would consistently crash when trying to load it without having the GPS enabled. It would not ask me "Hey, would you like to use your GPS or Network Positioning?" like the Sensation. It would just close. Not a big deal, but yet another small issue to contend with. Navigation without 3G is impossible on the Sensation. However I am lucky, because as long as I stay within Canada I have 6Gb monthly data from coast to coast. And there are plenty of paid GPS navigation apps for Android to choose from. Camera: Why include a front facing camera on the N9 if even the OS itself does not support it?!? Yes, PR1.2 will fix that months after launch, but Skype may still not work with it. The Sensation's front camera works perfectly with Skype. This is a big deal for me, since I have relatives abroad, and I use Skype very often. The still images captured by the N9 are better than the Sensation though. Nokia quality shines through here. And yet the Sensation can record 1080p video, compared to the N9's 720p. STORE or REPOSITORY APPS: The N9 is so far behind Android, it's not even worth discussing. Even if you want to stick to pure open source apps, just look up fdroid and getjar. They have more open source apps than all the N9 apps together. It seemed like the majority of N9 apps were some kind of references or maybe bookmarks, wallpapers and ringtones. I never installed those, so I couldn't tell. What's up with those being listed as apps?!? The quality of the apps is also rather poor. Compare FBReader on the N9 with FBReader on the N900 and now take a look at Cool Reader on Android. Make up your own mind which is better (hint: N9<N900<Android). And it's not as if Cool Reader has a huge development team, it's just one guy. I read many books on my phones, so this example stayed in my mind, but there are many others. Even when compared to the N900, the N9 is just not cutting it. Load up fapman on the N900 and you can see a LOT of apps. Many haven't been updated in a very long time since the devs gave up on the platform. But they still work as indented. I prefer quality over quantity, and there are a lot of garbage apps on the Android Market. But the N9 doesn't have either quantity nor quality with a few exceptions. BUGS: A huge issue bug I ran into with the N9 was the idle battery drain caused by meegotouch (I can't find the bug number, but I tried) It was assigned to a Nokia developer, however it will NOT be fixed in PR1.2, so I'd have to live with it for the foreseeable future. My battery would drain around 40-50% in 8 hours while I was sleeping. Workaround? Move icons on the screen when I'd detect a battery drain. Right. That the N9 has bugs is not the issue, since it's expected with a new platform. But Nokia may at any moment drop support for it and forget the phone ever existed. It happened with the N900, and without the CSSU a lot of problems would have remained unresolved. Conclusion: Thank you for reading this far. I spent a long time writing this post, but my purpose was not to start a flame war. I do not even expect a reply, although it would be nice to hear your thoughts. I am a Linux geek who saw great promise in the N900, only to be disappointed by the N9 and the end of a dream. I HATE Android. I hate rooting Android devices, which was as simple as installing rootsh on the N900. I hate giving Google all my personal information so they can sell it to the highest bidder or use it to create a perfect copy of me on their servers. I hate having to be check when I install an app whether or not they will send my contacts or other information to even more companies. And I HATE having to settle for the Sensation, which after the N9 feels unfriendly and difficult to use. While I do think Elop was insane to make his announcement so far ahead of the Lumia release, especially since Windows Mobile in its current iteration is even worse than Meego, he had a point. Meego is unfinished, and now it will remain incomplete forever. Even worse, on many levels it is worse than Maemo. So now I am faced with the prospect of... what? I guess the answer is "get a life and stop treating a crappy phone as the center of your existence"