Thanks for all the responses. I think the issue I'm having might be related to the one mentioned in this thread:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42500

and this bug report:

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8723

So if you have a similar issue you might want to vote for the bug.

As I posted on the thread above I've disabled some widgets:

Ap news
personal IP
conversation inbox
FM transmitter on/off

And restarted my phone (yesterday) and since then its been quite snappy. Last night I ran a bunch of browser windows while simultaneously listening to music and checking email without any stuttering. I left the windows open overnight and kept on going this morning and only had a little stuttering when I launched the mail client but it was very minor compared to previous days.

I'm not convinced the problem has vanished since, as i said, it can take a few days for this slowdown to showup but its nice to see how fast this phone can be :-> I just hope this was related to one of the widgets I disabled and if so then hopefully we can pin it down.

I should reiterate that its hard to reproduce this bug because you can't just run a bunch of stuff and see a slow-down. Rather the slowdown appears after having the phone running for a while and can happen even with very few apps running leading me to believe it was a memory leak in some background process. The thread above suggests its a problem with Hildon-Home.

@Catacylsm: it would be nice to hear how your experiment goes. Are you running any of the widgets I mentioned above (if you don't mind sharing)?

@slender: my problems were not all based around listening to music but its just very noticeable there because playbacks starts stuttering. When the phone was having a "slowdown" e.g. processing a picture would take forever even if the music player was not running.

I can point to a few things that seemed to really slow the phone down when I was having this problem:

- Music player
- Establishing 3G connection
- GPS locking (related to 3g connection cause its A-GPS)
- Taking photos (related to the GPS connection prob cause I used geotagging)
- Switching to portrait mode in browser or phone

In fact the portrait mode in the browser still seems to slow down the phone a bit. Does anyone know how I can re-disable it?