Thank you for the excellent review. How is the battery life?

i am in the market for an E6 for that very reason. i long for the days of being able to go out all night and stay connected without stressing about the battery.

i love my n900 but hate that part of it.

Nicely thought out review. I appreciate the fact that you have written it in way to many details There are things with which I don't agree, the biggest being the browser comparison. N900 is way faster in both rendering and page responsivness. N900 is iOS smooth. When overclocked it can even keep up with dual cores in speed, lagging behind only 2, 3 seconds. I have personally tested the N900 against an E7, Optimus 2x and Galaxy S. N900 is night and day in regard to E7. There are videos on youtube that can prove my comparison. E7 struggles to the max in rendering and scrolling Engadget. N900 renders it fast and is buttery smooth throughout rendering, especially with HW sync enabled. Compare the browsers again

This is one of the most informative and clear reviews of a phone I have ever read, so thanks for the effort. if anyone was ever thinking about moving from N900 to E7, or just using them in tandem, this is the post to read!
However, I think the N900 has one BIG advantage over the E7: removable battery. I travel a lot, and often I find myself digging around in a pocket to find my spare battery to swap out the dead one. I'm good to go for another 2 hours of skype video calls!
My fear would be that I would be stuck on a train or plane with a dead E7 and no way to recharge it, and this is not a problem with my N900. Anyway to get around this problem?
Also, the no SDcard isn't a concern for me, as I'm hardly using my internal memory and/or card right now, so I can be economical when loading songs, videos etc. I know people have lost their tempers at Nokia for the lack of memory card, but I really think 16gb would be plenty - what do you think?
Once again, thanks so much for your thoughtful insights on the E7 - it makes great reading! Cheers

My point is that it is therefore very well possible the E7 will slow down over time, while the N900 seems to have handled a full storage quite well.

I have meanwhile looked at the E7 briefly in the shop, and while it is certainly a very nice device, it didn't feel quite so responsive as my N900, even if it is more smooth once it starts moving.
True, once the N900 starts swapping, the fun is over...(I heard KP48 has some kind of memory-compression, I think I will go and try that now

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.

I'm trying to think of new questions that finally make me decide that this is the way to go, but it's hard! Even now, while travelling in the UK, the N900 does the job great. I video skype my girlfriend in USA, copy+paste text and numbers from one app to another, find my way around on the London Underground with an app, enjoy easy to connect wifi, the list goes on. But I suspect your E7 does all of that, maybe without the video skype, but then maybe there's an ovi app for that too? The more I read and re-read your great review, the more I seem to be scratching my head and asking myself, "what am I waiting for?" I played with one a a phones4U store, man, the thing is sexy
But come on, let's have an ndi list of what it *can't* do, a quick list of cons, if there are any. Thanks again, I love this post

@ndi
You have misunderstood the meaning of smooth in what I was trying to say. Smooth doesn't mean tearless, it means being fast and responsive throughout. N900 is iphone smooth in that sense. N900 renders pages fully with flash and yet you can manipulate the page however you want at any given point during rendering with no stuttering whatsoever. E7 is far from achieving this and unless you are comparing N900, E7 and iphone side by side, you won't notice since you will adapt to your current phone and forget about its shortcomings. The browser on S^3 just plain sucks in comparison to MicroB, and that's a fact.

The full CPU usage of N900 during flash video playback is because of Flash 9.4. It is the full desktop version which compared to Flash 10 is utter crap. Flash 10 utilizes the GPU, which for new phones provides HD flash playback capability. Blame Nokia and Adobe, not N900 for not providing Flash 10 and not having it optimized for so many releases.

There was no point in explaining what a dual core means in performance, but thank you anyway for taking the time to type all of that. As of today, in smartphones, there is no point of having a dual core. It's good to have the raw power on an unoptimized software like Android which is finally capable of achieving iphone smoothness, but it comes at a price. In order to achieve smoothness like an iphone, Galaxy S II is utilizing both cores all the time, hence the heat from the SoC and battery. Offloading tasks to another core is not currently done. Both cores are utilized like single core CPUs. Nokia has been doing dual CPU design for a long time in phones like the N95, N82, N73, N93, etc.Dual core for now is just a gimmick and will stay like that on Android for much longer.

That narrows it down, but I still disagree.

N900 has traded ability to manipulate page for gray hash. IPhone has traded it for white paper. E7/Symbian in general doesn't. As the review says, it prefers to render first, rather than allow interaction sooner. That's why it's jerky until it's loaded, and that's why it's faster in many cases - it puts all its might behind renderer, grossly ignoring user. Can be frustrating for large pages over poor connection.

If you prefer the sacrifice in reverse, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini are both available and render in N900-vividity range, full pages, can swap user-agent, etc. Poorer support for Flash, however, as I understand it.

It's still a choice rather than good versus bad, and it makes it (say what you will) faster, by the definition of faster, not by feel. Which is, it will finish first given equal conditions.

You can declare whatever you wish as whatever you wish. Both N900 and E7 are better browsers than iPhone, and E7 versus N900 are very different browsers. However, "sucks" is not a benchmark. There's fidelity (N900), speed (E7) and smooth(iP).

There are many a parameter to a browser. And many a site. As a result, things are different for each and tradeoffs exist. That's why browser benchmarks and reviews are 20 pages long. But I suspect you already have a favorite, and the others suck.

This is a review not a court of law. I don't give a flying duck who's fault is what.

I was aware at the start of this endeavor that I would find people who'd disagree - I'm surprised it's not a riot, considering the review declares E7 a winner on several fronts - some of which have been the undisputed domain of N900 at some point. This is one of those cases. Have fun disagreeing.

It does. It has copy-paste, the Tube app is available for S3, it has easy auto wifi, to known APs or to open APs, just like N900, including banning WIFIs and setting 3G to be over a certain wifi in priority (though quite useless, methinks).

I don't use Skype. You might enjoy arguing here, but AFAICT it's all up to the authors of Skype. My guess is it's en-route, no idea when.

There's a reason why a list of misses isn't already in the first post, bulleted. And that reason is: not everyone misses the same things.

When N900 was new, people kept wanting stuff - like Mail for Exchange bugs - fixed. I haven't even seen one, let alone care if it worked, but I would have paid people for a better Contacts app that can hold labels for numbers, more numbers, better pictures, etc. (E7 doesn't let you rename labels, hello cruel world)

To each his own - some people are music players, audiophiles, they can tell the difference between N900 sound and E7. To me, they both sound horrible, I'm the kind of audiophile that invests in a 1.4Kg headphone with 7 speakers and a great SNR, the best sound card I can find and shielding. Others use FLAC with in-ear devices. Others use speakers. Beyond good or bad, there's user preference. I could argue for a week on sound rendering (that's not an expression), but if user prefers N900 sound, what good will I be?

Many people here shudder the the thought of E7 lacking a terminal and not being able to grep their ls through awk. Personally, I think it's neat, and that's it. Frankly, it kind of loosens quality control if Joe Average can just type sudo and fix it themselves. (another week lost arguing here)

What I can tell you I think is objectively lacking is the app base of proven tools. It is lacking in VNC, RDP (I imagine it won't be long), but is strong in gaming.

Subjectively?

I miss Telepathy integration into Conversations(*) . I miss the M5 status that was always available and could do stuff (S3 status not everywhere). I miss some apps. I miss keyboard shortcuts. I miss overclock. And TMO.

* App named IM+ offers the reverse

I don't miss the awful Phone, the constant swapping, horrible performance unclocked, horrible battery clocked. I don't miss the poor battery management and information, I'm glad I traded IR for compass (fiddling with TV beats Augmented Reality). I don't miss the slanted phone on table, poor kickstand, the camera (photo and movie), LCD screen, poor USB (connector and OTG), headphones on the wrong end, memory leaks in Python widgets, 12M transfer every apt-get update. As I type this I realize this paragraph is way larger than the previous one. I don't miss the poor maps management, lack of map updates and caching, the online routing, online search, no true drive or walk assistance, no voice, no saving of favorites. I don't miss poor PC support. I don't miss device-exclusive backups (the backup data is in Berkley-db format and is N900-only). I don't miss the litany of incompatibilities (BackupMenu needs BootMenu, but Android needs MultiBoot, KP versions, CSSU versions, Python versions, you name it). I don't miss the never-will-be-fixed attitude.

Well, that was a painful trip back through time. Patlak was right about one thing - with time one gets used to the device and starts to develop cognitive bias. The OVI bug with the maps (up there) was fixed in 4 days. Four Days. I missed that. Support. Content. Active development. Being on the map.

Maybe I'm just that guy who made it out of the desert and can't stop drinking the water while everyone wonders what the heck is going on. Maybe I'm rationalizing my decision; but I'm tired of being told I can't have this or that for a hefty sum when people with 1/10th or 1/100th the value in their hands have tons of fun.

When E7 stops being supported, I'll upgrade, Nokia or otherwise. I'm tired of begging unseen faces on forums for a simple app. I don't want to learn a new platform, a new language, sift through tons of manuals just for a small detail. I'm tired of rotating my own tires with only an adjustable wrench and a manual in Japanese. May I be forgiven, for I know not what I say. I'll even buy the damned iPhone.

Just tell me how much have you seen of that gray hash on the N900 when browsing with PR1.3? I have had to stab the phone 20 times per second and than have it appear, in other words, it's pretty much nonexistent. Both your E7 and your perception must be special. There is no way an E7 browser is faster than MicroB on the N900, unless you spray pixie dust on that ARM11. N900, as I said, renders much faster than the E7 and yet it's still super responsive. Again, tested with both in hand, on the same wifi connection.

Let me put it in your words, I don't give a flying duck what the renderer does on the E7, it hangs like crazy, it's $hit. I'm not gonna wait 2 minutes for a site like Engadget to load in order to still have jerky movement on the browser. Good luck convincing yourself persistently.

It's a review like you said, so stick to stock vs stock.

Wow, saying the iphone browser is $hit (in a diplomatic way) compared to E7. Keep convincing yourself. Lack of flash lite 4 doesn't make it $hit. It does everything else better than E7, and yet it's smooth as silk.

Since you're a lazy *****, I did the hard job for you.

Nokia X7 vs iPhone 4 IT starts at 9:50

You are right. If you are willing to install Opera in order to overcome the browser's incompetence, then you should know the fault and download a youtube client such as QMLtube in order to satisfy your thirst.

There is disagreeing blindly with the complete article and then there is disagreeing with a certain front in the comparison. I only said I disagree majorly with the browser comparison. You should listen to an objective opinion, by someone who has tested both devices next to each other and made the comparison. Test them yourself and then try to insult an opposing opinion. You have had the N900 before and don't have it now which makes your comparison invalid.

Advice to the wise - Don't make one front a World War.

Nokia sucks no matter if n900 or e7. There is always something missing on this nokia phones. iPhone is truly the best phone right now for an overall experience and ease of use. I even got suckered by Ericsson into buying E6, doesn't come close to iPhone, and can't connect to my corporate email. Nokia is a failed company, that is why they moved to WP