I was not impressed actually, my friends made it sound way better. It does have some features the iPhone 3GS lacks (flash, decent camera, better screen resolution), but the iPhone 3GS is an iPhone 3G with a compass and more memory, and the iPhone 3G is already more than one year old.

So, in short, I don’t think the N900 is really worth it, and here’s why:

It got late to the party

While it does add some new features, it’s being released later, and the iPhone has already a HUGE advantage, meaning more accesories, more apps, etc., also, being released later means that it doesn’t get as much attention as it doesn’t innovate as much.

The touchscreen

It’s (almost) the same size of the iPhone, and the resolution is more than twice the iPhone’s (that’s cool), but the lack of multitouch is what bothers me. It’s not because there are a lot of things to do with multitouch, but because the way a non-multitouch screen behaves when it detects multiple touches is quite ugly (from my experience with Palm). And the multitouch is good for innovative games, apps and features.

Also, if I know Nokia, they’ll try to fit as much as they can in the screen, which is not the point on a limited screen. Apple did a great job on the iPhone’s UI.

Design

It’s nice to have a physical keyboard (although the iPhone’s auto-correction makes me not need it), but that means having a mechanism that can get stuck, and makes the device not as sleek, which leads me to my next point, and this might sound really fanboish: it’s not Apple.

Apple’s devices are usually really sleek, look at the iPhone, it has as little buttons and connectors as possible. Nokia won’t bother about that, and will add slots, conectors, a keyboard, and a lot of things that will make the phone not look as good as it could.

Frameworks

As a programmer and now a developer (I enrolled for Apple’s program today!), I can’t leave this out. Apple provides a really complete set of frameworks (although sometimes I feel it’s too easy to put an app on the store, which leads to a bunch of crap too) that allow developers to exploit the device a lot, and the UI frameworks help to keep a consistency on the UI, plus they come really well documented, let’s see how they handle that with the N900.

What I DO like

I do like that it runs Linux, as I like and use Linux a lot. Also, having root access is cool too (not like we can’t have that on the iPhone, right? Though it does lead to a lot of stupid users to break their phones and complain a lot), and not having to pay for distribute apps is a great plus too.

The camera, flash, Flash and a full featured browser are good too, but a) I don’t use my phone as a camera that much, b) I do prefer having a mobile browser on the iPhone as some pages are formatted nicely (check this site with a mobile phone!), so they don’t mean a lot to me.

Nonetheless, I’m glad Nokia is stepping up with a decent device, because it means Apple will have to cut the crap and start improving the iPhone with what we want and need.