I too never ever regretted buying the N900. It was worth the money and if I could redo it, I would buy it all over again. This phone opened the world of linux to me. Like you I never could afford to have my only desktop running linux, since everything at school is windows based.

Before my N900, I had only tried linux in a virtual machine. The N900 is a wonderful piece to mod and play with. In the beginning I would hardly use xterm, but now I think I use it more than a GUI. I can honestly say that if my N900 breaks, I will try to buy another one. None of the other devices on the market are appealing. The N900 with its wonderful OS set the bar too high up. You may disagree of course. There have been many disappointed users, but to me it's the best thing there currently is.

Development on the N900 is raging right now. There was a period near the PR1.2 that development slowed down. When I say development I don't mean of normal apps and games, but of changes that affect usability in a big way. In a few short months we have had fcamera, hostmode and preenv. These are huge developments. There is also psx4m which has picked up progress. Not to mention the many other small and extremely useful apps like 'app search widget', 'series finale', 'fbreader', 'hermes' and many more. All of which the developers are amongst us, asking for input and feedback and they release it open sourced for the world to use. I don't think any other OS including webOS has these types of apps. Most other OS you'd have to pay another 100 € to use the apps you need.

One of the best thing the N900 introduced to was these forums. I learned a lot from here. We have everything anyone can want from here from experts, helpers, greeters, fanboys, trolls, fanatics, idealists, geniuses, average joes etc..

But unlike you, YoDude, I have used the N900 as a phone. And it works wonderfully. I can call anyone, without problems. And I can sms anyone, with the useful threaded sms feature. I never has a problem doing that. Any other thing..I have never used before..so of course I didn't miss them. I never sent MMS (which in Malta with the 100kb limit is worse than useless). And I never used things like dedicated ringtones or speed dialing. Although I think there are workarounds and solutions for these thanks to developers. I don't know for sure as I don't need them. But the N900 never failed to do those two tasks (call and sms). What other thing should a phone do??