Don't take this the wrong way, but either you have a magical N900 or you have a very different concept of time. N900 is not smooth by any standard. From shipping, it has tearing and is jerky. One can sacrifice speed and stability for a bit of smoothness, with HWSync, but N900 is not and will not be anywhere near iPhone smoothness.

I understand that jerkiness is subjective, I know people who claim that games at 50 FPS, HWSynced are unplayable on PC, whereas I find that 30 FPS is fine for non-shooter games. To each his own. What is not subjective, by definition, is average user perception. I spent a while on the forums and I can say for sure that the majority of people agree - N900 is not as smooth as iPhone.

a) Dual cores means not they are fast. Multicore systems allow for several tasks to be performed in parallel with less slowdown. A 6-core 3 GHz is as fast as a single core 3GHz if you only have one task at a time, or if the sum of all tasks do not exceed core capacity.

That's why most people still buy dual cores. One core can be dedicated to a game, app, etc, while the other keeps the OS responsive and takes on services and hardware. More than 2 cores are meant for servers and multi-core tasks, like mapped image processing, multi-core rendering and the like. The reason phones have 2 cores is so that the phone remains responsive and the music plays (and call audio is smooth) while the user fires up something complex.

Once you have a video playing in a flash player AND you fire up a game, then you see what multicore does. Speed of web has nothing to do with multicore.

b) If your concept of 2-3 seconds is "only", I think I know what the problem is

Microsoft guidelines for applications consider "wait" to happen if user spends over half a second waiting for result. It's a good estimate (let's leave the MS jokes at the door, please, they've been done to death). Go over that and the user will become aware of "waiting".

Then you better play them on E7 or a laptop, because there are threads here the size of China complaining about N900's inability to keep a straight face during playback. I think you might just have the best N900 of all of us.

I thought mine was optimized but N900 needs all its concentration to play a flash video.

I'm sorry, it's just that it's not my experience that's subjective and different from the majority, it's yours. I'm glad N900 performs so well for you, but most of us have stutters at the beginning of video, low framerate until video loads completely, and limited success with even dedicated apps.

Finding a few counterexamples doesn't mean the comparison is invalid. I chose widely used pages, like Google, Facebook, TMO, pages people use and pages people visit every day. In every test, E7 was faster.

I don't deny Engaget is faster on N900 (I no longer have N900, I can't deny squat), I'm saying that even if it is, I'd rather have a browser that does Google faster.

People browse search engines, forums and social sites more than overcrowded, up-your-browser, nobody-is-mobile 4-MB pages. That page is slow on my PC.

The review exceeded 15k limit twice thus far and has been split in 2, plus another post under it. Also, I have edited posts several times. I distinctly remember reviewing battery life, complete with screens. Look through the thread again, I'll be happy to answer any specific questions.

Not for me, but I never had a second battery

External battery pack. It's larger than the simple battery, but several options exist.

However, the autonomy on the E7 is way larger, it boasts 9 hours talk time in 2G, it's hard to run out unless you play full 3D games for hours.

Not saying it can't happen, it can, I drained the E7 in as little as 3.5 hours, but if you actually rely on the device you'll slow down, for example play music instead of 3D flight simulators (HAWX is nice).

It can do 35 hours music, and 9 days in standby. With no drainer widgets and conservative power usage it can last 2 days with music, net and speech.

I don't know how much Skype calls take, don't use it myself, but your 2-battery issue can be mitigated by extending one battery.

When entering panic mode (lower screen brightness, move to 2G, widgets to offline, no haptic) it goes for quite a while. 9 day standby means about 10% a day, so even at 20% left (which for N900 means 3 hours), you can still squeeze a full day and a few calls.

Also, it can enter power save by itself when a certain threshold has been reached, which is a nice touch. I have mine on 30%, which serves as a warning that I've had my fun and I should cut down if I want to make it. From that point on, I restrict myself to calls, SMS and minimal web, which gets me home that day.

Personally, I like to keep my device shiny and useful, but not bloated, so I have:

2Gb: Map of Europe (majority of). I don't plan on exiting the continent unprepared. Could be less. Romania alone is 48M.

0.5Gb: Music. At 3M per song, I have 1-200 favorites, or 500 minutes, about 10 hours before replay. I never play for 10 hours, so that's plenty. (math is very loose)

1Gb: Video. I take the time to transcode my videos. I use FormatFactory. I maintain folders for car video, phone, etc on PC. I make changes in those folders and sync them.

My 4-core 4GHz, dual-video-card assisted, water cooled PC eats through video like a whale goes through plankton (I had to brag). It takes me about 15 minutes to transcode what I want to keep. Instead of 500M a video, I have 45M. That's 20 clips, 4-5 for showoff (from 1080p) and a few favorites.

300M: Images. A few favorites, from vacations, a few car pictures and a few samples from Nokia that look smashing on OLED.

Total: 3.5G. Out of 16, I have 12.5 G free to do as I please, plenty for letting it film 720p until battery runs out. I sync the device and keep my data on the computer, where it belongs. Not because of space but because I can't find what I want in 4000 pics. I have an ordered gallery (I own a DSLR) so having a structure on the PC helps.

So there you have it. Keep it decent, it's easy. If you, as other people have stated, can't be bothered to transcode full feature films, then one movie is 12Gb. Bam! Out of space. I've seen complaints that it can't play 1080. People act like space is free. 1920x1080 video on a 640x360 screen, a whooping 9 pixels thrown away for every pixel drawn. And they wonder why it's cramped in there.

What I don't understand is, so what if it had a card? 2 movies? Doesn't it take longer to copy it to a card than to transcode to 640x360? It made sense in N900, you could have another OS in there, run backup, but E7 has no alternate OS and does its backup online (scheduled).

But, to each his own. Don't remember iPhone 16G users complaining about space. Why? Forced transcode. Ever sent a 12 MPx JPEG to an IPhone via hacked firmware? Smooth it's not. With limited resources, optimization is everything.

-------- Rant.

That's why iPhone is buttery. Optimized UI graphics, minimal impact, same simple theme, scaled images, downsized video, approved codecs. Don't remember seeing "Unable to play video" yellow banner on iPhone.

I don't like them, but let's give them their worth:

An Apple hardware, running an Apple OS, with an Apple codec, decoding an Apple format written by an Apple transcoder, conforming to Apple standards, that takes approved Apple video input. Hardware accelerated. Thoroughly tested. On every device.

A Nokia device, running Linux, with a basement enthusiast codec, decoding a new format, written by a free app, that takes a manatee as input, loosely based on stained napkin sketches after 12 beers. Acceleration is broken. "works for me if held at an angle". Requires QT 4.6.3.4.5.3 build27-power3, KP 48, Python 2.4.3 and hardware revision 2.2.

As smooth as iPhone. Hrmph.