Symbian S60 and S40 (N79 vs 6300)

So the screen on my Nokia N79 (S60 3rd Edition FP2) died on Wednesday morning, leaving me sans-phone until I returned home that night from work, to boot up my old Nokia 6300 (S40 3rd Edition). It is much smaller and lighter than the N79 and with a predominantly metal case where the N79 is all plastic. Overall it feels much nicer in the hand and less creaky - one nil to the 6300.

But more than that, although I have become used to all the many S60 apps that are floating around (apps with much better design and functionality than Java-based apps on the S40 devices, due to the fact that S60 has a native API to write to, and of course can multitask) I actually really enjoyed going back to S40. Here's why:
+ Speed of the user interface, almost every action or menu dialogue is much faster
+ More customisable active standby; why we can't customise the S60 3rd Edition active standby screen is beyond me, and none of the replacement apps for this have cut it for me so far
+ Countdown timer & stopwatch - bizarrely missing from S60 out of the box
+ "Recently used" in "to" dialogue of new SMS - again, missing from S60 and so useful!

On the other hand, S40 loses points because:
- No auto/regular contact/calendar sync to Google OTA - turns out I've become very dependant on being able to add/modify data to my Google cloud services on computer or mobile and known they would be in sync within minutes
- No multitasking - again, something long-time "feature phone" users may not have worried about, until maybe moving up to a "smart phone", then trying to go back to

I admit that the N79 is perhaps quite old now, and maybe a bit more beef in the CPU/RAM area may make S60 more responsive.

So if S40 is still being developed, which Nokia made hints about in January when showing how they expected proportion of form factors and operating systems to pan out over the coming years, maybe multi tasking and OTA syncing, or Mail for Exchange, may come around the corner?

The question now is whether to bear the 6300 without Google sync for 6 months until contract renewal time, or buy something like a 5800/5230 to bridge the gap, or buy something new and shiny, maybe even dip into Nexus One or N900 territory...