Mine died too early to ask for an N9. Still, I got one and I'm sticking to E7 for now. This may sound weird, but I'm not a fan of N9.

No keyboard, for one. Second, I hate how it tries to teach me to use it instead of it learning from me. It slides, it fades, it does all kinds of stuff and it's IMO way too *** complicated. Use a damned button. There is nothing wrong with a button. WP has them, Android has them, iPhone has them, everyone. And they're mandatory. And for a good reason.

Also, it's (like N900) a one-of-a-kind, not all that bright future, beta OS phone. Options are missing, important stuff, like browser options. Plenty of bugs (silly, beginner bugs like truncating strings when adding favorites).

It's nice and shiny, but frankly N900 was way better.

It traded hardware keyboard for no keyboard, full keyboard support (Ctrl+C, Shift+left) for jack s***, a beta OS for an Alpha OS, full SIM for small SIM, SD card for no SD card, removable battery for non-removable, and what did it gain? AMOLED, though with high resolution but capacitive screen. And a fix that actually accelerates UI, something N900 should have gotten after-launch anyway.

I have 3 in my family (1 16G and 2 64G) and, in complete honesty, I rate it below both N900 and E7.

I know it has a better camera than E7, and a shinier, faster UI than N900, but it has lost its soul. N900 has a geek soul, left everything behind to offer geek heaven. E7 has a business soul, sacrificing geekiness for Office, ease of use and autonomy.

Who here agrees that making it 2 mm thinner than E7 was worth the sacrifice of keyboard and that "snap" it does popping up?

12.1 mm (N9) versus 13.6 (E7).

1.5 mm.

How tight do your jeans have to be to care about an extra one and a half millimeters enough to renounce extra hardware?

Opera Mobile is free and has the option to send desktop useragent. It renders like desktop Opera mostly, and while it has some stuff reminiscent of Opera Mini (like shortcuts being "* 4") it is a good replacement. It features real tabbed browsing, full rendering and it's butter-smooth.

Not decent. It's called a replacement for a reason

I tried, even with broken GSM and GPS, it was still a nice wifi browser and a platform that runs VNC (S3 is the only mobile platform out there with no RDP or VNC. This has been your trivia fact for today).

They said replacement implies removing the original and called me a greedy SOB.

Nah, I kid, they were really nice, but they kept the N900. Maybe they replaced the board and gave it to one of other people that asked for a replacement.

If people tell you you had your phone off while it's fine, that used to be mine.