Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

I have an old phone, which I use ofc for phone purposes but lately I've wanted to buy an mp3 player. I decided to buy a new phone instead cause it comes with an mp3 player itself. What I liked about the n900 is its huge memory capacity... Then when I was researching later on, I found out how open it's OS was thats when I started to like it, I could do pentests, light coding and stuff...

I have now decided to buy this phone, if you guys however could recommend another phone that is quite similar, or if it has somewhat the same memory capacity and has a qwerty, then that would be great, I would reconsider buying this...

OH and also, Im not doing any browsing without wifi.. It has terminal anyway so virtually, I could use any wifi out there...

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

It won't give you much as the real bottleneck of the N900 is IO, so I suggest you to get a uSD with great random write speeds and put swap on it. This gives much more performance boosts. Sure you will notice overclocking will make the device look faster as transitions are faster buit the real performance boundaries are reads / writes from the "disk".

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

I see, but, what would I need performance for anyway? for games and stuff like that?

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

Sure, and there is no reason why future SDXC cards (128 GB and more) shouldn't work - currently, all you need to do, is format them using some sane filesystem, like ext2-3-4 or vfat (from factory, SDXC cards have exFAT filesystem, due to windoze)

Hoever, I know that kernel-power & CSSU team is working (or planning to) on backporting things, that should allow using exFAT too, so no need to reformat. No much reason for using it over better ext* filesystems, just to have possibility of doing so.
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As for you overclocking question, it looks the same as with overclocking any other computer's hardware - all warnings like electromigration etc apply. That said, running N900 with up to 900 mhz is considered sane, by practice. I use my device with limits 500-900 mhz and set the same for every N900 in possesion of family members and friends - never, ever, any problems with it, despite some devices being used for years.

As for extending battery life, you may want to look at this thread:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=65568
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Before asking if N900 could do something, ask yourself, if desktop computer powered by linux an with comparabl hardware could do it. If yes, the answer is "yes" too, with high probability - unless you're first to try that thing (o no one written correct program, or kernel modules), and need to get your hands dirty, or, in very rare cases (nowadays), there is closed source blob sitting on your way.

/Estel

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

Not that I don't overclock myself but I say im ~90% on 600Mhz as max ;) Sometimes I need that little boost for emulation (dosbox) or 720p recording (see my signature). There are special occasion you might need this performance boost but I would say for day to day use it's not that much of a gaining.

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

Quick reply...
I don't over-clock. It's out of character of me to take risks which could lead to permanent injury. I am using CSSU-Testing, with extras-devel repository enabled. Sometimes, I install CSSU-devel application (tklock). I do not play computer games... but there are exceptions, such as chess, tic-tac-toe, mahjong... I dislike violence, and I never play video computer games. I am a light developer - HTML, Javascript, CSS, C, C++...
I will use Nokia N900 for as long as I can. I will repair it, replacing damaged parts with new ones, for as long as I am able to.
The only phone I could recommend as newer successor of Nokia N900 is Nokia N950. Maybe, Nokia N9, if you don't need hardware keyboard. But the idea of Aegis makes me uncomfortable.
If I was in a falling air-plane, the objects I would protect would be Nokia phone, Fujitsu computer and identification documents, and yes, in that order. Computer would be turned off and in its bag, so its hard-drive will not be damaged much, even if it is submerged in the salty water (though this possibility is reason enough to consider investing in waterproof-fireproof bag). Nokia would be turned on, and its hardware is much more difficult to replace if any of it gets damaged (yes, a small and waterproof-fireproof-impactproof case for it would be a good idea; but I still would not trust it out of my sight). Identification documents are not that difficult to restore, and hold no sentimental value.
Best wishes.
_________________
Per aspera ad astra...

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

I seriously considers these 2 since they're newer... Too bad they had to have small storage capacities.. God I would pay $200 bucks more for a 128GB n9

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

Aha! So that's what caused the plane to crash ;)

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

never mind the battery life, i think most people (myself included) would happily sacrifice a few months on battery for the extra speed in overclocking. the component you're reducing the life of is the CPU itself! once that's gone, sell it for spares on ebay.

personally, i do clock mine up to 720 every now and then (oooh, the extravagance!) and it does add a nice bit of extra speed. i tend to get worried and reduce it back to normal pretty quickly, though. :)

as mentioned here, your best gains are to be made by swap on an SD card.

Re: It's Almost March 2013, is n900 still worth buying?
 

You are seriously giving me wicked ideas...
The Boeing 737 series is the best-selling jet airliner in the history of aviation...
It was found that cell-phone signals, specifically those in the 800-900 MHz range, do interfere with unshielded cockpit instrumentation...
The captain of a Boeing 737 airliner on an instrument approach to Baltimore-Washington International Airport one night in March 2003 reported that his course indicator, called a localizer, had been centered during the approach, then suddenly showed a full deflection. Just then the aircraft, flying on autopilot, broke out of the clouds—at an altitude of 2,500 feet and a full mile off course. The incident is described in NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (asrs.arc.nasa.gov). The 737 pilot theorized that after announcing that the United States had started attacking Iraq (information received from air traffic control), passengers had placed calls on their mobile phones.
To the frustration of Boeing engineers, follow-up testing never duplicated the problems, either on subsequent flights or in the lab.
The government first began investigating disruptions from carry-on devices in the early 1960s, when an FM radio was blamed for an incorrect off-course indication...
A popular mobile phone broadcasts its intended signal at a frequency of 1,850 to 1,910 megahertz and a power level of 30 milliwatts. At the same time the phone is emitting its intended broadcast loud and clear, it is also putting out an unintended, or spurious, low-power background buzz of radio signals ranging in frequency from 100 to 2,000 megahertz. It happens that the very high frequency radio that air traffic control uses to communicate with cockpit crews broadcasts at frequencies of 118 to 137 megahertz, which falls within the frequency range of the mobile phone’s background buzz. Interference is not likely to occur, however, as long as the VHF transmission is sufficiently stronger than the phone’s background buzz. But the farther the airplane flies from an air traffic control tower, the weaker the tower’s signal is when it reaches the airliner. And if the phone transmits a signal that has the same frequency as the tower’s and is nearly as powerful, the two signals will compete with each other. Result: interference.
Thanking Wikipedia and Air&SpaceMag for the information. Now, an interested hijacker would need to go into physics of mobile phone’s background buzz, and probably low-level programming to increase the power output of the 'buzz'.
Best wishes...
_________________
Per aspera ad astra...