While not a programmer, I am a geek, otherwise I wouldn't own the N9, right?

Quick background: I own an iPod Touch 4th gen, a Nexus 7 tablet, an HP Touchpad and, up till last Wednesday, had been using Windows Phone. I have owned a Nokia N810 (still one of the greatest pieces of tech I've ever owned) and a Nokia N900.

Even more background: I don't care about apps. I read email, use the camera, check some web sites and use Spotify. All doable on the N9. Yes, the app store is tiny, but I knew that going in and didn't care. This phone may be a hard sell to a 19 year old, but I am in my 30s and am way over the "i need 5000 apps" thing.

So, how am I getting on? Well, after a bunch of tweaks, I now have the N9 where I want it. I am using it on T-Mobile in the USA, depending on where I am in my city, I get everything from 3.5G to 2G.

When I tried to use the N9 as I did my Windows Phone, it was almost unusable. Windows Phone seems to be able to handle "being on" all the time, running background tasks without slowing the phone down. The N9, didn't like that. It's not a big deal for me. I had to find the perfect balance between refreshing my RSS feeds and my email. I had to turn off Facebook feeds.

I installed FasterN9 which, I guess, works. I almost see no difference, then again, I really only have emails constantly updating. I imagine I could tweak endlessly (from reading these forums) and get it faster and have it operate the way I want, but I am quite alright with how it is running now.

Now, the phone is responsive. It works at the speed I want. Sure, when I manually refresh my feeds it slows down a bit, but that is a 1st-world problem. Having to wait an extra 10 seconds will not ruin my day.

Amazingly, Spotify on MeeGo kills the Windows Phone version. It is MUCH faster and has more options. I am very happy with that.

Vimeo on Meego is good, not great. The video quality makes it almost unusable.

My verdict: N9 is a great phone. Sure, you need to poke and prod to get it where you want to go, but once you get there, it is solid. Also, if you care about these things, almost everyone I know has asked about the phone since I started carrying it. And not just asked, they grab it, caress it and want to know more. It's like walking in to a room with a 2-headed snake.

I plan on getting a Lumia 920 when they are released. Ultimately, I've grown accustomed to WP and its fluidity. But I always wanted to try MeeGo and I felt this was a good month to do it. Who knows, perhaps the N9 will help push my L920 lust back a month or so.

am 19, this was the easiest sell in my life. am currently suffering from terrible battery drain but its because its not calibrated

That's great! I should have said MOST 19 year olds. I have a hard time getting my cousins to look at anything other than iPhone or Android.

try the N9 QuickTweak app tweak C

And if you have that battery monitor app, just remove it, i found it actually drains battery

Vimeo app; you mean the official one that was released less than 2weeks ago? I haven't tried it yet but the screeshots looked quite okay to me so I assumed the app plays back acceptable quality videos too...

If your email is set to push via MfE why worry about constantly refreshing it? RSS feeds when you update manually and try to swipe away yes it may lag but then that's due to the heavy load onto the system for the few seconds...

You find it acceptable hence I wouldn't suggest any tweaks

Running background tasks is quite smooth on the N9...Personally, I'm quite moody; at times i vigorously close any app I am not using otherwise I keep my frequently used apps like phone, contacts, messages, web, music, calculator, documents, mail in the background so whenever I click on them they open speedily and switching between them is pretty smooth too unless of course a call comes in while doing the swiping...

The video quality on the Vimeo app is abysmal -- compared to the WP, Android and iOS versions. The app itself is beautifully designed. I'm not too concerned though as I don't watch too many videos on the go now that I am stuck editing most days.

I have the same problem with occasional slowness and degradation of experience over time. It's certainly something specific because while I have never been able to pass the 11 day uptime mark without the phone being unusable, there are guys over at the uptime thread with >140 days of uptime. I checked dmesg, xorg logs and syslog without seeing anything suspicious. I have spotted the messageserver eating 100% cpu some times, but it's like the N9 is teasing me, every time I get near a pc and ssh to it to try and find the culprit, it goes all smooth and all. I guess I have to reflash some time.

I also suspect that if I remove gmail altogether everything will be ok.

So you recommend a restart every 5 days or so? When you say reflash, do you mean a total reset of the phone?

I can't manage to keep my phone going without a reboot for more than 2-3 days for some reason or another...The people who manage to do it really my hats off to them...

Its quite a challenge for me to withstand any signs of lag and delay so the moment i see them I reboot to ensure its nothing untoward...

i can, i managed to keep it from rebooting pretty well actually, my n900 had like 3 reboots a day, but the n9 has been solid for a week at times, i just at times boot into android