Before I start, let me just say that I love this phone. It does however need some significant fixes and automatic connection/disconnections is certainly one of them.

I have come from an N95 and on that I had several connections defined. I had various wifi points, including my home ones and I had two 2G connections (bad 3G signal where I am). One went ahead and connected without prompt, the other I had set to ask for a password.

Anything like weather, email etc. that was to be "always on" used the unrestricted internet connection.
Everything else I chose how to connect, be it wifi or 2G (using the passworded connection).

The phone checked my emails and whatnot and closed the 2G connection automatically. After using any other application, the connection was also closed obviously on all other wifi/2G connections.

The only thing it didn't do right was to allow a connection priority profile thing (which I think the N97 does allow...?) whereby you choose wifi a, then b, then blah, then 3G then give up.

The N900 should be so much more advanced at handling connections - to simply come on and stay on is really beyond basic and I can't imagine why this route was chosen. At least an inactivity auto-disconnect timer OPTION should be included.

I also don't want to trust the phone to handle my 2G/3G connection as if something goes wrong and starts downloading lots of data (due to a bug/bad design/whatever) I could end up with a huge bill. I'm on a data plan but the recent firmware updates used up over 20% of my monthly allowance - all it would take is for my home wifi connection to drop out for a moment (or longer) and the phone would decide to use 3G (if the setting to allow this is ticked of course). It's not always obvious that it is happening either. The email application seems to just download emails and attachments automatically - I see no option to turn it off. I regularly get emails from clients with truly massive attachments *sigh* (100MB+). On my N95 I would just choose not to download those but have no choice on the N900 for such things - except to turn off automatic email checking - and then what's the point in the phone really?

At the moment my data connection is pretty much useless when I'm out and about - there's just too little control to trust the phone with it. An OS like this should be promoting more complex options, more power to control power usage and more granular control over scenario/use profiling of ALL features.

In these respects the N900 is far inferior to Symbian on the N95/N82 etc and I assume 5800/N97 and so on. This REALLY needs fixing (and yes I have voted on the bugs - can't log onto brainstorm to vote there).