At no point in the three days I had it did I ever feel like I was on a smartphone, it was more like an old linux computer….one that just happened to be able to fit in the palm of my hands.

When I say old I don’t mean slow, I mean when linux was 100% only for geeks, old. No polish, nothing feels thought out for the end user. All the features you’d want in a high end smartphone are there, but man Nokia clearly never thought about employing a User Interface designer.

I was amazed that the mail client expected users to put in pop and smtp server addresses for popular email services like gmail….I was like, really?

The N900 just had a whole lot of little “issues” that left me cold. I could look past the random restarting thing, but the UI felt so unpolished next to all the other smartphones out, that I could never recommend the N900.

Which is a shame because the N900 really does a lot of things really well. The Video playback is smooth as butter. The browser is top notch, even doing a good job at Flash. Going by Bounce, the N900 graphics capabilities are also staggeringly awesome. The keyboard is pretty good (not Touch Pro2 good, but still). And overall build quality is very solid.

I was left thinking Nokia rushed out the N900 and really it needed 5 or 6 more months of development.

HTC on the other hand is generally a bit sloppy on the multimedia side of things, but they’ve gotten the user experience down almost perfectly now and for me that’s more important that video playback frame rates.

Great hardware, niche OS.

So although the TP2, and HD2, still are running nothing more than a polished version of Winmo 5 (upgrade after upgrade does NOT make a ‘new’ OS), if i only had the choice of the two, i’d go with WinMo.

We (my employers) use TP2′s as daily devices for our field (desktop support) engineers. I’ve upgraded most of them to 6.5, and they work fine (except when the engineers beat the sh*t out of them!). We also use Nokia’s (E71′s), but there is no way i would recommend we switch the engineers to N97′s, Mini’s. I’ve used them, and they just don’t compare. Bear in mind, as i’ve said elsewhere, that i come from being an N73 and E90 user over the last 3 years. But i just can’t see where Nokia’s going, and until they sort themselves out (S60, Maemo, Symbian 3/4/5), i can only, if asked which antiquated, business centric, phone OS with loads of apps to go with, suggest WinMo.