Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

Memory "management" on android is, in one word, @#!*. On my galaxy note 2 with 2GB ram and with over half of it free and with just a single foreground application running (web browser), when I press home key to switch to home, then long press home key to bring up list of recent apps and return to web browser it has already been chucked from memory and has to merrily reload the previously opened tabs again. It does this consistently, even straight after a reboot.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

I don't wanna quote Jobs but really "You're doing it wrong".
I never have trouble pulling down the Notification drawer. I know the problem you have, I used to have it too. The way I fixed it was to simply PULL DOWN.

One swipe down.
Going down to >70% of the screen would guarantee it opens but its needless. I simply do ONE single SHORT pull downwards.

I apologize if this wasn't the issue you were talking about.
Android has A LOT of problems, but the Not. Drawer isn't one of them. Here's a list with some of them, its a good read trust me:
http://acko.net/blog/why-android-hates-you/

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

Yes, it also happens on Android 4.2/4.3 on Nexus 4 (4-core @ 1.5 GHz, 2 GB of RAM) and Android 4.0 on Asus Transformer TF101 (dual-core @ 1.0 GHz, 1 GB of RAM).

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

You're right :o

My default home screen had a weather widget at the top and I've had to move that because it was 50/50 whether I'd get the notification drawer or the weather but now I've lowered that I can open the drawer with a short quick flick.

Thanks.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

I don't know about their issue, but I find I have a lot of trouble with swiping in general. I disabled swipe to unlock since it usually took me about 3 attempts. Same thing (and more annoying) when I have to swipe to answer a ringing phone. The drawer is the one swipe action I actually have better success with, relatively speaking, in that it seems to stay open 2 out of 3 times I try.

Strangely, the swipe gestures on Blackberry seem to work for me almost every time and feel intuitive. Not sure why Android feels differently.

Thanks for the link. That is an interesting read. I agree on a number of points, although I'm not sure if we should be taking UI tips from a person with a website that jarring.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

exactly my thought. :)

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

i used maemo for a long still i come here to see what i am missing now a days.

to be frank i like a few things in android. the app store! it is a great experience to install app and uninstall without waiting unlike HAM (i know about FAM but it is also too when you install an app)

many games and stuff available in the android market almost no lag no bug good amount of updates good support from google too

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

Anyone who prefer an n900 over a decent modern Android phone for anything other than nostalgic reason is a complete fanboy, maybe even slightly insane.
The n900 is just too slow in almost everything. And I know some of you will argue that if it had quad cores and 2GBs of ram it would be fast too... Well it doesn't.
I was able to load theverge mobile site, scroll down and hit "full site", load that and reload SIX times before the n900 was able to load the full site once, on my iphone 5. And I imagine a modern android phone will be just as fast.
Not to mention the terrible battery life, bad camera, low quality lcd, resistive touch screen and chunkiness.
The world has simply passed the n900 by, sadly. I did love it back in 2009.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

if nostalgia is the only reason then I'd agree with you but it isn't. :)
I like the hardware keyboard, fmtx, and ir (though recent androids have that now).
and I can't fully trust android. :) (paranoia is different from nostalgia)

after cssu and the tweaks around here, I no longer find the n900's battery life terrible.
I also disagree with the camera being bad. stock camera is actually good and so is the lcd. I don't know why you'd call the n900's lcd bad. is it the size?
resistive yes but it's responsive and people here who draw using mypaint use it very well. :) I don't mind the resistive screen but I do appreciate the fact that I can use almost anything as a stylus for it.

chunkiness, yes that's another point I'd have to agree with you. :)

I also use a galaxy note 2 btw.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

Well. I suppose there are a few advantages. But I would argue they are far too few and far between to warrant choosing an n900 over a modern phone.
You can easily buy fm transmitters for your car(which is where I assume you use it) that will connect to your samsung via bluetooth. I used one such and it worked great for my iPhone apart from the problems all fm transmitters have with stations creeping in on the same frequency.
And I don't know what you take pictures of but my n900 is decidedly sub-par compared to modern day phones. With and abundance of noise and weird colors creeping in on my photos especially indoors.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

What's bad about the lcd is the contrast and the black levels. The colours also look washed out. Mind you this is compared to my iphone 5. But this is 2013 after all. I don't mind the size.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

For me I don't see too many people really claiming that the N900 is truly a better all around option today, just lamenting the fact that Maemo is still superior in so many ways compared to Android, iOS, and WP8...and wishing there was hardware available to match the OS.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

Anyone who would prefer a modern Android phone over an N900 for anything other than the stereotypical smartphone tasks never appreciated what the N900 actually had to offer. See what I did there? I took your format of:
[sweeping generalization of people's preferences], [dismissive acknowledgement of reason deemed 'acceptable'], [insulting dismissal of all other reasons for that preference]
..and reversed it, albeit with a little less condescension and asininity.

Anyway:

There are no other phones on the market currently that offer everything that the N900 offers. (And I've had plenty of opportunity to familiarize myself with WebOS, Android of all sorts from Froyo to Ice Cream Sandwich, Windows Phone 8, and am about to get my hands on a Blackberry 10 device.) If there is any device that you think really does, point me to it, and in the event that you are right, I will be eternally grateful. More likely though, I will just point out something that I like being able to comfortably do on my N900 that the other devices don't offer.

There are, unfortunately, also plenty of things that the N900 can no longer do or never could do that modern phones excel at. I readily admit that. And I hate that that's the case and find myself using my N900s less and less for things like web browsing and so on. But until a device lets me do all of the things I routinely do on my N900s, with the same or better level of comfort and freedom etc, until then [edit]or until the deficiencies of the N900 become bad enough that they outweigh those things[/edit], there is no viable replacement for me, or for the numerous other people who still use N900s as their main phones or whatever.

I guess many of us chose n900 and n9 even though they are outdated, cameras arent as good as they could be, battery life is quite bad but I cant live with anything else. Yes, both my n9 and n900 are slow but I know that and I can forgive them that. I could have had sgs4, iphone 5, bb z10, lumia 920 but when I use them I feel they are slow. Why? Because when I know I've got damn fast quadcore and 2GB of ram I expect it to work fast and I have that sgs4 in my hands and I use and I get mad because it lags, that freaks me out. I mean really freaks me out, then I take out my n9 and I open telephone app and it loads faster. I'm like wtf?! Then I unlock that sgs4 and its loading widgets. Again, whaat? I used to hate my n9 for working slow, then because it died on me I was forced to use lumia 820. At first I was sceptical and hated it. Later when I got used to it I hated it. How could the 'perfect os' hang, require reboots and those tranaitions took forever. I fixed my n9 and I am not going back to anything else. Jolla might be my blessing. Since then I bought another n900 and have a lot of fun with it. Now I am just thinking about buying an 808 to play with it and have a phone that simply works and no matter what photos it takes, I can be sure they the best I can get.
oh, about bb10, I was expecting something different, more harmattan like and faster. And that lock button on top, it killed it.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

So I got to mess around with BB10 for a few days now. Personally, I actually don't mind the lock button on top. Though it would be nice if there was a gesture to lock the screen without using the button, like there is a gesture to unlock the screen without using it. *Shrug* Full disclosure, I have yet to have actual experience with Harmattan, as I've never had access to either an N9 nor an N950.

So far I've enjoyed the gesture based navigation, the much more proper multitasking vs how so many mainstream mobile OSs do multitasking (from what I understand - I haven't seen iOS7's multitasking, but I imagine that like Android, they still mostly pause programs in the background unless they explicitly do things in background services in their code, which as far as I'm concerned has never been enough to count as true multitasking), though I hear running background code without a window being open at all is very painful to implement on BB10 from a developer perspective, which in a sense is also a lack of full proper multitasking. It's a nice OS and I wouldn't really mind it too much if that was what I had to use as my day to day device. I enjoy using it, which is more than I can say for regular use of Android or iOS.

But everything I said in my prior post, about the N900 being able to do things that other devices of the phone variety can't, stands.

Re: Why does Android feel so lacking?
 

[QUOTE=Mentalist Traceur;1377693]So I got to mess around with BB10 for a few days now. Personally, I actually don't mind the lock button on top. Though it would be nice if there was a gesture to lock the screen without using the button, like there is a gesture to unlock the screen without using it. *Shrug* Full disclosure, I have yet to have actual experience with Harmattan, as I've never had access to either an N9 nor an N950.


I enjoy BB10 too. I also wish there was a lock option without power button.

You can do that while peeking on the lockscreen though. Drag the finger from bottom and up so it lights up. Keep the finger on the screen and then swipe down over the bottom edge again and the screen will turn off.

I love the BB10 keyboard. I will buy another Z10 once the price hits rock bottom. They are beginning to become as cheap as the N9 here in Sweden.