N900 Anyone? Options

[Wildherb]

I've just replaced my mobile phone and based on a good experience of the N810 I've bought an n900. Early days, but here are some initial impressions:

The UI is pretty usable and the zooming is very slick and smooth. Lots of RAM seems to keep everything moving along when multitasksing, but the write speed of the memory feels slow. No benchmarks, just gut feel.

Application availability is still poor. Things such as Abiword are starting to appear on extras-dev but overall, way behind the competiton. Come on, Nokia!

Hardware is great. Its fast. FM transmitter, fast GPS, real keyboard - everything you need.

My plan is to do relatively little tinkering on the phone OS itself, in order to keep it working as a phone! but easy Debian is installed and that seems to offer a great sandbox to play in without fear of breaking the phone itself.

More later. Anybody else got one?

[merlin1]

I got an N900 eight days ago, yes. So I can only share my first impressions but they're mostly positive.

Maemo 5's UI is nice and smooth, device is very snappy most of the time. Mine is a bit sluggish occasionally but a reboot always fixes that. I don't have many apps installed except for Easy Debian which I plan to use as a sandbox as well to assure Maemo remains functional, i.e. I always have a reliable phone. Going to try a few more apps over time and hope more will appear soon as it is, as you said, well behind the competition.

Multitasking works fine without any noticeable slowdowns. Good hardware (CPU, RAM, camera, storage etc.). When running Easy Debian I sometimes wish for a bit more horsepower but compared to my old N810 the N900 is much faster. Debian apps run slower than on the Netwalker though. Web browsing is a dream as nearly everything is there including Flash and sites look just like they are supposed to.

GPS takes a bit long to get a lock here and the keyboard is usable but not that great IMO. The non-centered space bar and only two arrow keys (remaining to are mapped to Fn-Arrow combinations) are two downsides. I have a German QWERTZ model though, maybe the US keyboard is different.

All in all I'm pretty impressed. A worthy successor to the N810. I don't actually compare the N900 to other phones – I own an iPhone too – but to MIDs/older NITs. The price is a bit on the high side if bought unsubsidized.