No offense to the N900
 

No offense to the N900

Hey guys I love the n900 and the full openness it has created. I also hate the iphone and what it stands for.

Bbutt…..

I was playing with my girlfriend’s iphone 3gs last night and my god. You forget how fast the device is. I took a video and played it instantly no lag anywhere. How is the n900 so much slower? I know we have to give the device time but I don’t see the speed of loading videos in the media gallery and after taking a video getting any faster. S60 media gallery slowness was never fixed, always stayed ssllooowww. Why is the media aspect of the n900 so bad? I didn’t even realize until I played with the 3gs, i just got used to it.

ps: the n900 is my favvourritteee thing right now. learnt so much about linux from it

Re: No offense to the N900
 

Iphone is not able to do a real multi-tasking, so it does not much except running a game. Also the resolution on the N900 is way higher so it has to process way more informations.

The media aspect is at least for me fine, videos never lag and it is able to play all kind of HD videos perfectly. The iphone is not able to do that at all and will be never able to do it, would be pointless anyway on that low display resolution :P

Still I must agree that the 3GS is not that bad when it comes to games, here is the money and high amount of users the reason. If you want a gameboy then get the iphone, if you want a good smartphone where you can surf way better with flash support and use real multi-tasking then get a N900.

It are in my opinion totally different devices and this is the 10th thread about this topic already. If you want to get a better relation with your Girlfriend then you should get a Iphone, she will force you sooner or later anyway.

Re: No offense to the N900
 

True good point.

lol ill never own a iphone. ill be a sheep following the rest

Re: No offense to the N900
 

You might be forced to make a decision soon:

Re: No offense to the N900
 

<Tries to ignore above pic, stay focused on topic>

Mightn't this "speed" issue have something to do with screen resolution? I saw a youtube vid comparing the iPhone and N900 browsing experience, and someone made the comment about how "the iPhone browser just follows your finger", whereas the N900 browser had a little bit of lag every time you fingerscrolled.

But I did a little research and realized that the N900 has over twice the screen resolution of the iPhone - so of course things will move around faster on the screen - it's pushing less than half the pixels. Does this make sense?

Re: No offense to the N900
 

dang I see this topic serious but ..... :eek:

Re: No offense to the N900
 

• Screen resolution - The 3GS has a 480x320 screen (153600 pixels). The N900 has an 800x480 screen (384000 pixels), so every N900 frame rendered is the equivalent of 2.5 Jesusphone frames.
• File format limitations - When it comes to video, the 3GS is limited to two: H.264 and Quicktime MPEG-4 files encoded to Apple's strict specifications (i.e. no higher than 1.5/2.5mbps, maximum res 640x480). By contrast, the N900 is limited to... anything readable by FFmpeg or gstreamer (i.e. just about every god damn video format ever made ever).

So while you give up a "guaranteed" smooth experience, it's really a compromise for more utility, such as being able to play AVIs straight from the interweb without the need for long and pointless transcoding. While I wouldn't call the video playback on the N900 perfect, the sheer range offered by osso-media-server/Mplayer is unparalleled and is (for me at least) a killer feature.

Re: No offense to the N900
 

Dude that is an awesome slogan for an N900 advert

Jesusphone 480x320 screen (153600 pixels).
N900 800x480 screen (384000 pixels).

Every N900 frame rendered is equivalent to 2.5 Jesusphone frames.

No comparison really, its like oranges and apples.

Re: No offense to the N900
 

Thank you for confirming my statement. (Where were you in my other screen-res topic that got ignored?!?! 8^P

Re: No offense to the N900
 

Why not have both? :D

Re: No offense to the N900
 

It's not just the output resolution but the captured resolution of the video: Limited quality=better peformance.

Re: No offense to the N900
 

Maemo's slowness has to do with a few things.

1. It's a full unix environment. It uses scripts interpreted under heavyweight shells (bash/busybox), a standard VFS that loads data from a filesystem to ram before executing, and it swaps.

2. Apps are large. X11, GTK, standard libc.. all of these things take time to load. Where iPhone has a vastly simpler API and execution stack, our devices can run native openoffice.

3. Due to memory limitations, aforementioned apps and libraries are not locked to physical memory. They're allowed to be swapped out, and the device doesn't have enough memory to keep unused libraries cached.

The screen resolution is really irrelevant to how long it takes to load the app, but it's a testament to the power of the n900 that it can render video fast enough to update the 800x480 screen at 30fps.

I don't know how else to put it .. the iPhone is a toy, relatively speaking. A very slick, shiny, well optimized toy, to be sure. It is not a general-purpose, POSIX compliant, network-graphics-aware, fully multitasking pocket computer. It runs one app at a time and has a neat notifications / background task system to compensate.

That's not to say that there isn't optimization work that can be done on the n900. It's entirely possible to get the mediaplayer to load and play much faster, but it could result in some unintended consequences (ie. additional swapping of other apps).

Re: No offense to the N900
 

I'd like to say "why not have all three!" and that's excluding the iphone :D

Re: No offense to the N900
 

N900 is way better......however, email sucks on N900....to me that is the only achilles hill to the phone

Re: No offense to the N900
 

Wow I am impressed with the responses to this thread. What a collection of brilliant minds the maemo community is. The iPhone is fast becoming a chav item - dumb as ditchwater it is.