I didn't want to kick off a Symbian slagging off thread
As an owner of several Symbian phones (currently Nokia 700) and also having an Iphone4 in the house, I don't see an objective difference between these.
If you want a phone (for making calls) then Nokia make a great product. Totally consistently, put any Nokia alongside an Iphone4, in a weak signal area (i.e. most of UK countryside, including where we live) and the latter will become unusable first.
If you want a phone as a multimedia device, the Iphone4 excels with its very slick finger interface.
But the Nokias do the usual functionality just fine. I can get email (POP/SMTP), www (all the sites I actually need work just fine), it plays videos, takes pics, etc. Objectively I would not swap my Nokia 700 for the Iphone4. And if somebody sends me a 10MB PDF attachment at least on the Nokia I can copy it to an SD card, a USB stick, etc.
The 808 is an outstanding phone+camera device. The phone as as good as any Nokia, and the camera outclasses every pocket-sized camera including the ~£350 models such as the Canon S95 (except for the extremes of optical zoom). It probably matches some big stuff too, in simple lighting conditions etc. It may run a dead O/S but so what? I've got apps for everything I need, except perhaps the ability of Oziexplorer to run DIY (and various bootleg) maps, which is available under Android, but smartphones aren't great for GPS mapping apps because the constant-on display makes their battery life useless. Nokia Maps gives you outstanding satnav, free worldwide coverage, IME close to TomTom which cost £120 for the Iphone (£60 for Europe and another £60 for Greece
) and then the phone runs with external power anyway.
Jailbreaking Symbian is trivial (google on heloox), and the last few O/S updates didn't break the jailbreak, but most people don't need it because the file system is open, except for some system directories.
As regards 3G etc, Nokia phones normally show separate symbols for GPRS, EDGE, 3G, and I think anything above 3G is marked as "3.5G". It is common to see 3.5G in heavily built-up UK regions, and more so abroad where it is almost universal. I have just been to Lanzarote and the only place one could not get 3.5G was inside the caves
One can disable HSPA on Symbian phones, leaving just plain 3G. I measured loading times on some "heavy" websites and there is a ~ 5x speedup on HSPA so I consider this important.
I don't know why Nokia don't sell the 808 officially in the UK, while they obviously and openly sponsor Amazon to do so. It doesn't make commercial sense. The HSPA issue is a simple replacement of a MOSFET on the PCB, which Nokia service shops do, but one can't get it done in the UK because it's all grey imports.