You know, I wonder how many people are seeing bad performance because (and this isn't an excuse, it just is perhaps unexpected behavior) they load the device with 20GB of music and then start doing their performance tests.

Of course, the n900 will spend the next several minutes/hours grinding through that 20GB of music (slowing down responsiveness, killing the battery) with the tracker. Meanwhile, the user says "wow this experience, it is teh suck".

The iPhone? It uses your deskop pc and the apple itunes software to do all that processing for you, and then ships the metadata over. Nice, except you're locked into itunes and you can't dump songs on/off the device directly.

Anyway, I just wonder if that may be a contributing factor.