Im gonna make a blog post about this most frustrating piece of junk I have had the mispleasure to use recently, but thought I would throw my thoughts up here first to see what others find with them. Seeing the N900 videos on youtube has just shown how crap this is in comparision to what they are looking at turning out soon which has provoked me into putting this into writing...

Is it just me or is this the singually most frustrating product ever made?

Constant lags in the UI seem to be the norm. Even the vibrate for tactile feedback gets delayed.

But now I find I have to turn the phone off for the USB port to work - it will charge ok off the car or home chargers when on, but plug it into a computer and nothing happens when on - not even the white LED by the microusb socket comes on. Turn the thing off and plug it in and the 2 drive letters appear, and it charges... The hopeless PC suite software will tell me its in a non compatible mode, yet turning it on and setting PC suite makes it do nothing when plugged in.. WTF?

Maps is worse then useless, it sometimes takes 10 seconds to just show anything, when parked up in pakapura trying to use it to find an address, "My location" was showing home - exiting and reloading maps did nothing to solve it - I had to power off (by removing the battery since the power button was locked up) and restart it - a 4 min process. Garmen was good on the N95, but the copy I have is not compatible with the N97 so I am stuck with that abortion of nokia software which is slow and cant find streets despite me looking at them on the map and typing the name exactly the same.

The music player is junk - still only a few volume steps, and still sounds bad, no way to search the lists with an onscreen keyboard so have to pop open the qwerty and press some letters of the name of the track I want - forget scrolling the list onscreen by touch - the scrollbar is too cource to get anywhere. Still has to pause the playback to play a new message beep despite using the speakers for the message alert and the headphone port for music. Also no support for album artist tags, year etc, so all my VA albums are a mess with loads of artists with only 1-2 tracks showing in the album off that artist.

Still has no support to not play music out the speakers, so when you unplug the lineout cable to the car from it, you get assulted with loud tinny music till the music player decides to finally come front when touched so you can pause it. No hardkeys anymore which was a very useful feature on the N95.

Then there is the touchscreen phone dialer - it only has numbers on the keys - so if I want to call a word number, I have to do it by memory since if I change the keypad to alphanumeric I am typing in letters.

Still has a 1 min limit on video on the front camera, At least the main one finally has 16:9 record - but only for video. Stills are still in 4:3 so need cropping later on to show fullscreen without messing with zoom etc.

Photo browsing on the phone is useless slow. Zooming in shows a pixelated mess for 2-3 seconds before it will clear up.

Seriously, this phone is like they made a really nice piece of hardware (physically and mechanically), then got some total crap software and spent a week hacking it so that it had some basic support for touchscreen and pushed it out the door.

Still has the random quits of applications all the time that the N95 had, particually with email, still no support for html emails, still get some mails show as pages full of random crap with an attachment. The phone is full of lag. And now nokia are pimping its replacement all over the net with a usable looking user interface. So really the chances of them making the abortion of S60 turd on the phone into something usable is practically zero.

If I had paid for the phone rather then goten the use of it till the end of semester it would be returned for a refund by now.