I bought an Android phone for two main reasons:

1.  I wanted a definite solution to the contacts and appointments synchronization between my laptop, desktop and mobile phone. It's a pain in the a** to have to copy (or worst, manually entering) the contacts list from one phone to a new one and having to manually synch them between the desktop and mobile phones. I know there are a lot of solutions for this problem but none seemed quite right for me. Besides, I already use lots of Google services (GMail/Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Documents, etc), so it made sense to buy a device that uses this information directly.
2. I needed (wanted) an Android device to learn and test development of Android applications.

This particular phone seemed interesting to me because it ships with a recent version of Android (2.1) so I wouldn't need to figure out if/how to upgrade it and because it comes with a lifetime subscription of NDrive (Portugal map) and since I was planning to buy a GPS, this ends up being a two in one deal (I know there is a Google maps/Navigation application for Android, but this way I don't have to worry about excessive network data consumption).

I haven't used it for that long yet, but my first impression of the phone is very good. It's what I expected from an Android phone: very good integration of Google services (doh). I just turned it on, entered my google account login and... presto!... there were all my contacts and calendar events. It also seems to perform very well (although I admit I don't push it very hard: I don't usually use my phone to listen to music or play videos, or games...)

Because this is a TMN phone (although I use it with UZO) it ships with some useless (to me) applications. One application specifically made me search for the Root procedure to remove it. The Sapo Banca application periodically connects to the Internet to download the newspapers covers and news. I didn't find a way to stop it from accessing the Internet without even asking, so I had to remove it. While I was at it, I removed all Sapo applications. 

The first thing to do it to get root access to the filesystem. I just followed this tutorial  (there another one in PT). Then you just need to get a shell and delete the packages. Actually, I had trouble with this. I ended up doing the following (after getting root):

1. Launch Windows Terminal
2. Go to the Android SDK tools directory ("cd d:/androidsdk/tools")
3. Launch "adb shell"
4. Remount the system mount point as writable ("mount -o remount,rw,codepage=utf8,vfat,xattr,check=no /dev/stl6 /system"). You can check what device to mount (/dev/stl6, in my case) by writing "mount" and searching for the system mount point and associated device.
5. Delete all sapo applications (rm system/app/pt.sapo.mobile.android.*)
6. Reboot the device (it starts complaining that Sapo Banca terminated in an unusual way :) )

Now I just need a few accessories to the phone:

1. Car holder to use it as a GPS device. Has anyone tried this sticky holders http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/dash-genie-in-car-holder-p23796.htm? Do they really work?
2. Protective cover. I'll probably buy one of those silicone cases (http://www.amazon.co.uk/SAMSUNG-i5700-GALAXY-SPICA-SILICON/dp/B003UHZI52/ref=sr_1_32?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1280930501&sr=1-32), but suggestions are accepted.