Well I think I shall give this a try too. I just got my N73 ME in the mail yesterday, set up a bunch of apps. This is my first S60 phone so this whole experience is new to me, but definatly in a good way. I had Opera / MWeather / GMail all running and the phone was still VERY responsive (blows away my 6230i, but that thing is a dog).

I tried flashing to the IE firmware and in the process bricked my phone (or so I feared). Retry, fail.... Retry, fail.... being to panic?... Retry, SUCCESS!. Main thoughts so far are that it does seem slower, going to restore all of my apps and then evaluate for a few hours.

Whats the major difference between IE and the Vanilla FW? I know that IE has more apps installed by default, no big deal there I can install anything I want on my own. I know it also has the ME's music player, I do like that seeing as how this will be semi-heavily used as an MP3 player, but I have yet to try the Vanilla's player. What about the camera? I have heard a few people claim (w/o any real proof) that the images seemed grainier on the ME compared the Vanilla FW. AFAIK there is no hardware difference, so it has to be the FW if the claims have anything to them...