For the short answer go to the bottom, nobody has to read the essay.
Nice question. I really don't know. But I do know that personally for me having gone from N-series to E-series was the best transition for me.
Since you asked my serious opinion, I guess I will give it to you.
I don't care for any phone camera. Not to be a snob, but for the purposes I need a camera if I can take a picture of a document and later read it, that is all I need. A better camera is nicer but it is not a priority in the least. None of them even touch a basic $100 P&S so if it takes an image that is half-way decent it's enough for me.
Music player is nice but not critical. I never used it on the E66 and the N95 was frankly a bad music player. It sounded bad. I carry the iPhone these days and still don't use the music player except once a week for 10 minutes at best. So I have 8GB card mostly filled with Maps, but I never use that application ever. Google maps FTW.
What I NEED:
Push E-mail - both E66 and iPhone are great in that basic sense. I haven't tried BB but it must be great for messaging in general. So that is an option.
Within E-mail and PIM lies all my current fundamental needs.
The BB is very strong contender here, and the only thing that has stopped me is the BB tax. Since I switch my SIM back and forth I don't pay the Apple tax either. I know it's risky but when I bought it I added the iPhone plan to my account but for some reason it didn't go through.
I currently pay for hosted exchange so I would hate to pay again for a messaging service. But If I could get over that a BB might be the way to go.
Surprisingly the iPhone 3.0, while being a pain to use in most situations: press button, swipe to unlock, press e-mail, wait, click on e-mail, view e-mail, has the hints of something big.
Maybe BB is just as good on these fronts so let me know if that is true. But it recognizes names in general and fills them in for you, it seems to pull out names from your contacts as you enter them in an appointment or inside an e-mail or message.
What it hints at to me is the eventual integration of contacts with everything else. So if I click on that person's name in the calendar or inside an e-mail or SMS I can then see that persons contacts entry in full or even better yet a listing of all activities planned with that person plus all their pertinent info like default number, notes or to-dos involving that person, e-mail to or from or even mailing address all in one page. I want to click on a recognized name and see EVERYTHING I have associated with that person. I mean every connection I have in this universe to that person and to just show it all to me at once.
In a sense Spotlight already kind of allows that, but without the auto-generated links in documents on the device.
But guess who I think will be closest to the vision first. I think it will be Palm. I think that device is going to change the way we view and communicate with people. The way it is smart enough to recognize live and stored data about people wherever that data comes from and presents it to you at once is simply brilliant.
It moves completely away from the way everyone else looks at data. While everyone else is focused on Facebook or Twitter or OVI or the source of the data and where it comes from, Palm changes the paradigm. Now you see everything as related to a person, an event, or an activity rather than where the data came from. The whole concept is amazing IMHO.
For now the iPhone 3.0 sort of seems to hinting at copying elements from Palm but this is a stopgap until I get my hands on that Pre.
I've seen videos of that thing, and it does not close applications. It just lets you open whatever you want as many as you want (not 5) and lets you switch between so fast it's not even funny. This is like as many widgets as you want but each of them is much bigger and did I say you can have as many as you want? It even arranges them in a mini view so you can select the one you want. So this is widgets on steroids. This is what Nokia dreamt and Palm made.
Sure I lose the ability for developers to make binary applications but what really does it matter except for hard core geeks? I mean do you want the chemistry set or the chemicals? The end result is all that matters. They will find ways to open it up for new functions and uses as time goes by. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Palm Pre.