Here's my take based on the n950 I have:

Even with the Beta1 firmware, the n950 was my primary phone within 10 minutes of use. It just worked perfectly as a phone.

email: imap, pop, exchange all worked with minimal and extremely simple setup. Sync happens smoothly, does not interrupt the bluetooth connection or phone conversation. This was one of my major peeves with the n900.
Bluetooth connection to my Jabra halo and the panasonic headset worked perfectly.
Tethering a laptop across bt was quick and simple enough for even an inexperienced user to easily manage.

Browsing: the default browser was fast but did not support flash. it crashed on ssl pages sometimes. With Beta2, all crashes were gone, though some pages still couldn't be rendered. Curiously enough, these pages didn't render well in desktop chrome either. I didn't bother to investigate further.

Software keyboard: Wow. So much better. Within a day I could see why Nokia decided that for most normal cases the N9 doesn't need a physical keyboard. It's such a pleasant change from the n900.
On the n900, my default action to do *anything* on the device was to slide out the keyboard.
On the n950, I've often forgotten that the thing actually has a keyboard.
I realized this when I switched back to the n900 (for development) and noticed myself always opening the hardware keyboard rather than use the software one.
Also: auto-correction is present and is less irritating than the n900. On the n900, if I miss-spell something, the software input panel (sip) would auto-magically remember that misspelled word. Eventually bad spellings crept into the dictionary and that was frustrating.
In the n950, the user needs to actually click the miss-spelled word and chose to add it to the dictionary - just like any decent word processing software. So much better that way.

SIP, skype and jabber (gtalk/facebook) are built in. Facebook and Twitter clients are built in.
From what I've heard, MMS is built in. I've not bothered to try it out - no one I know uses MMS.

All apps are much more responsive. My Qt apps load much faster.

The inbuilt camera app is good for quick snaps and videos, and also has enough knobs to take really professional looking photos.

Battery life: Consistent skype traffic for about 4 hours brought the battery to about 20%
On the other side of the spectrum, I've managed to forget to charge the n950 for about 2 days and it was still alive.

Sorely missed: macuco2, firefox, opera and so on. I want more browsers dammit! But thats probably just me.
Also missed: openvpn, vnc client, rdp client. With these, I'd be able to completely stop using the n900.

The inbuilt terminal is surprisingly good - and even there I have often preferred the software keyboard over the hardware keyboard.

Anything else you want to know?

Forgot to add: According to the few people I know who have used a n950 and an n9, the n9 has a firmware better than the Beta2 I have on my n950.
Also, the one friend I know in Nokia claims that the form factor of the n9 is much better than the n950. He was surprised that I had the n950 and told me that the n9 is better.
When I mentioned that it's never going to be available in the US, he shrugged and said "Amazon, maybe?". He didn't elaborate, I didn't pry.

Probably a lot slower than it is without, no doubt.

Vodafone did try. They had their own product numbers which blocked firmware updates via Nokia Updater.
Resulted in a big slanging match on the Voda eForum, with Voda coming back with all sorts of weak excuses why we couldn't have the updates. So the majority of users voided their Voda warranties, which were deemed worthless anyway. I don't think the N9 will have a plan B for updates like the N900 did, probably all taken care of.

Not that I'm interested in how the N9 performs, (unavailable and too damn expensive and short lived to be of any use) being the main reasons why.
None of the manufacturers have come up with anything to tempt me away from my N900 yet.

Unofficial but 100% working Opera Mobile 11 is available:
http://www.my-meego.com/software/app...dAuto=59&faq=9

I am waiting for amazon to sell N9. Not sure I trust other vendors.

It's probably best to ask Nokia directly about that one. Sim lock seems to be possible, but I'm not sure about firmware branding. I personally wouldn't go near an N9 that had either of these, given that it's one-off device.

Wow, what a bunch of blatant copyright violations!

Looking at the comparison between N9 and iphone 4, the only difference appears to be in the GPRS class, 33 for N9, 10 for iphone 4. The specs are otherwise very similar.


http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3...&idPhone2=3275

N9 has no radio and it has Java ? Is it true?

For general browsing, I've been using Fennec exclusively for a few months now. Major points:

• fast
• bookmarking
• loads new tabs in background

I'm not sure what Nokia was thinking with the default Harmattan browser; maybe they've been working with the Fennec guys, because for general browsing it's that good. But as of my last build (July?), local chrome .css files were not supported.

See this thread and this link for more details.