Personally I am glad that nokia went with the OMAP3 instead of the Snapdragon with the N900. Snapdragon might give you the magical "1Ghz" figure, which in reality will drain your battery like I don't know what.

In reality, reading the whitepapers, snapdragon is not bad, just a very different SOC then OMAP3 is. OMAP3 gets it's strength from it's DSP's and GPU, where the Snapdragon gets it with raw cpu from clock speeds.

Using DSP's has been proven that it's less flexible, but way more power efficient. So if they can make good use of that design, it should be a win there.

Also... the N900 might just not need it. If you can do everything with it you want and in terms of mobile devices, is pretty much the fastest out there, or fast enough to do what anyone can think of doing with it? The choice is right again.

Also keep in mind that we don't actually know if anyone is using the GPU with licensed drivers from Qualcomm, in the past there have been major issues with this. Power consumption comes into play again, it might be faster, but at what cost?

About the memory issue. I'm thinking 256MB with 768MB swap should be sufficient, we will probably see a bump in this with Maemo6. If developers are aware, it should work pretty smoothly. And just like any other computer platform, if you run a rendering of for instance 3D Max, expect it to take all cpu and mem, if you are using notepad, expect it to only take a fraction of that. Use it wisely.....

It's like with the Nokia N97 and Samsung Omnia i8910. The Omnia i8910 has faster hardware and more memory all around, but the N97 somehow seems faster and the better experience. Purely efficient use of what is there, instead of throwing raw power at it, without optimizations.

Take a look at some info for Snapdragon and OMAP3. The OMAP3 has been "hand designed" for a port and is a quite balanced chip in the end. Where the SnapDragon has made consessions to achieve the 1Ghz, in a way that is less usefull, to me at least.

As a last note. I think that including only 256MB is also done because of power constraints. Using more high-speed RAM, uses more power. Simple as that.