I usually say `a handheld device with a cell phone functionality` to avoid such comments, I thought it's assumed when the N900 is the main subject. But yes, phrasing could be better...

The N900 does HAVE a Flash Player, and a not cheap-*** Flash Lite, like the Symbian, but a real, fully fledged, desktop-grade Flash Player. It's just not the 10.xx.xx version, which makes it unable to use internal Flash `3D` transformations, Vector classes, advanced typography and not much else. Strangely enough, in all my surfing with N900, I've encountered a site that required 10.xx.xx player only once. And it turned out that it didn't (you can check the fourth byte of any .swf file to see which version it requires, tho even if targeted for Flash 10.xx.xx doesn't really mean it won't work on Flash 9.xx.xx unless it uses specific Flash 10.xx.xx classes), but was a fault of the developer who made his own script for checking against Flash player and failed at that miserably.

And in such cases, the old rule applies - don't blame the device/technology, blame the developers. Your device comes with a browser as well, that doesn't mean it will show every single page out there - I can make you a .html page that no browser will load, that doesn't mean that the browser sucks, it means that I'd fail at my job as a developer.

Since you are making a bold claim - nearly all sites i go to say that flash is out of date so really this phone does not support flash - would you like to post some URLs of those sites. I'd be more than happy to tell you where did their developers go wrong if needed. The world is full of crappy developers, don't blame the device for them.

As for the Video itself, Flash 9 and Flash 10 support the SAME video codecs, nothing added or removed. There is no video that requires Flash 10. Surely, Flash 10.1 would be nice because it can utilize hardware acceleration of some chipsets, but apart from that Flash 10 adds nothing to the game when it comes to video.