Historical note: the N8 was, and still is, awesome. I still have it and somehow it still works.
The e-mail thing works now! I don't know why it wasn't working before, and I didn't really do anything to fix it, but it started working. Whatever.
In other Nokia news: the N8 looks AWESOME. *drool*
Nokia has a push e-mail service that you can hook your personal e-mail account in to; it is a backend for a Blackberry-like service which I find VERY convenient. Their e-mail application on the phone leaves a little to be desired, but overall it's stable and it works. The only trouble I've had, since the beginning, is that I can receive e-mail just fine, but sending never worked through their service. I had always worked around this by either not replying until I got home, or sending MMS messages to e-mail if something was time critical, or using a second e-mail client that worked for sending (but didn't support HTML). Kind of gross.
Supposedly, the thing that was keeping me from sending e-mail was fixed, so I was fiddling around with that, uninstalling and reinstalling and such trying to get it to work.
The outcome of that (about half an hour of fiddling and cursing) is that I still can't send e-mail, but now all of the e-mails in my inbox between 3/3 and today are gone. That's a lot of e-mail ... I keep a messy inbox. I'm very annoyed.
Historical note: @wilwheaton has since been run off twitter.
Got my phone back today! I'm in the process of putting everything back on it, but I'm very happy. In addition to not charging to replace the keypad lock key, they also replaced the camera lens, which was a bit scratched. They also tossed a $10 gift card in the box, which is pretty freaking neat. They refreshed the standard software load on the phone, which includes a lot of stuff I don't want (Bloomberg: never use it; Elle: who cares? CNN Video: never use it; ESPNsoccernet: never use it; Facebook: not on Facebook; Friendster: whatever; MySpace: not on MySpace; etc etc etc), but that's not too surprising. They do have the Amazon.com application installed, which is cool because I actually liked having that one and for some reason it's not on the Ovi store.
So now I'm going through the process of installing all of the stuff that goes on the phone. It takes a little while, but when it's done I've got my MP3 player (currently 25GB of MP3s on the phone), GPS (preloading maps speeds up the GPS software significantly).
As I go through the process, I'm noticing more cool stuff that never appeared before. For all of the little applications installed on the phone, they stuck the actual install files on the phone too, so I can re-install them without having to poke around Ovi store. This is especially nice for the Amazon.com application, since it's not on the Ovi store. Also, they stuck a bunch of random MP3s of actual music on there. Neat! It's actually good music, too. Also: they appear to have preloaded ALL of their maps onto the phone. That helps explain why the 36GB internal storage only has 28GB free (road maps of the entire planet take up about 1.6GB). Not going to complain, though I was going to dump those on the microSD card instead of the internal storage. But it takes a while to download all of that, so ... score! I'll take it!
The N97 hasn't been a perfect phone, and Nokia was a bit slow to react to some of the problems. However: the latest firmware update has resolved a lot of problems, and it seems like they treated me right with this bit of hardware trouble I had. I feel much better about Nokia today than I did a week ago. Nokia appears to have officially acknowledged that they screwed up with the phone and their handling of it, which is somewhat unusual so that's nice. Maybe I'll buy the N98 after all ...
Update: It's around 11:30pm, I'm still working on this. Went to add some stuff to the front page of the phone. All of the options I expected at this point, plus: "wilwheatons Tweets." Huh? That's new ...
Historical note: I'll say that Nokia was really good about warranty repairs. Also, fuck Stephen Elop for destroying the company.
On the plus side: my cell phone is on its way back from the Nokia repair center. Supposedly. I've got a UPS tracking number, but it's not in the system yet. Surprisingly, the phone was fixed free, under warranty, even though the warranty specifically excludes physical damage. Perhaps they backed down a bit on that for this particular problem, since apparently it happens to a lot of people. The sliding unlock switch is definitely a questionable design.
Really anxious to get the phone back. It's amazing how quickly you get used to certain features. Browsing the web, alarms, watching movies, connecting the phone to the computer, opening files, GPS, nice camera, etc.
whine
Historical note: I think this was my Nokia N97.
I'm in the process of backing up all of the stuff from my cell phone, so I can erase its contents and send it back to Nokia for repair. The little sliding "lock the keypad and touchscreen" switch broke off. Grumble. I've been getting around it for a couple of weeks; I can unlock the screen by opening and closing the keypad, and then lock it from a menu that comes up when I hit the power button. It's pretty inconvenient, and given the failure mode of my last Nokia (the little ribbon cable that connects the screen to the body of the phone broke) I feel like I should be careful of how much I open and close the screen. Is that really the sort of thing I should have to think about in a $600 phone? Ugh.