The hardware design looks just fine to me, and the specs sound wonderful. Android is somewhat of a showstopper there though.

What do you mean? It has an awesome name!

Exactly! Pong phone!

Android 2.0 Moto Droid looks more polish and finally grown up to the iterations before it. It will sell well and is a solid looking package... The more competition there is to concur the better maemo has to be too succeed mainstream it's not bad when others do better. It's what happens after you get beat that counts do you hit the gym film room and put the hours in or fold up and check out. I will be getting maemo5 based n900 as it is unfinished but it's new with great room for growth if the effort is exerted. We will see how much talk Nokia is after the dust has settled. Let android web is iPhone do we'll it long term adds to what Nokia user base will expect and implement as well offer there own unique services as well... At least one can wish!

Thanks for your insight... however I have one simple question.

Not having emacs and such; what are you missing in a phone as such though? Odd question, but I feel as if you would have an answer I'd appreciate.

Thanks again.

The N900 is no looker either. And as a slightly-more-than-average end user I find android a better OS than maemo. Sure maemo has potential, but the android has matured nicely. Maemo might have by the next release of maemo 6.

Still waiting for the rumoured HTC dragon. Till then I guess the N900 will do.

mainstream couldnt give a rats *** about openness or Linux, just whether it works, and is it easy to use*

the same way they don't give a **** about how a standard transmission lets you have greater control than an automatic transmission in a car



*just so you know



of course we're not the mainstream here which is why i shave with a straight edge razor, drive with a manual trans, write with a fountain pen and have a n900 preordered

Take it from me who has used Android and the G1 for over a year now.

The best apps came out when the device launched and "almost" everything since then is the same junk. There is no API access, so no new codecs or other hardware dependent apps can be made and the app memory is too low. The OS also gets bogged down a lot.

Even the game emulators on it are bogged down due to byte code layer translation. Some do play great, but use too much cpu clock to get it done and you MUST be able to overclock.

That being said, 3430 chipset should make a lot of issues better in regards to performance. Game emulators should all be smoother now, but it is taking a lot of hardware to make it better (kind of like Vista). Then again, Motorola is probably capping the CPU to conserve battery and you can not overclock unless you can root the device.

If you like apps, Android sucks, unless you like similar apps and do not mind running (quickly) out of space. There is no virtual app space unless you root your phone and that assumes 2.0 will allow it or it is not complex to do on the Sholes.

Android is just as bad as iPhone's OS but different ways. You can get emulators and other "like" apps for Android without rooting (for now at least), but Apple offers far more robust API support in their SDK. Apple also does not have LESS THAN 256megs for apps and the same apps on the iPhone are better than the Android versions.

Still, the true killer for Android is app space- it does not have much and is like building a shopping mall (app market) with no parking (app space).

The N900 and Maemo should not even be discussed in the same restricted, constrained, shallow world as Android or Apple, for that matter.

Not true: Verizon Wireless uses CDMA. No matter how unlocked your N900 is, you can't use the VZW network, which is indisputably the best for coverage overall in the US.

Unfortunately, VZW fails in every single other metric.

On the apps issue, Android runs the Google Apps - specifically Maps, which is far better than the current rev of Ovi maps on the N900 (according to reviews). I think it's fair to assume that, short term, Android will get more native Google apps than N900. I doubt that Google is developing for Maemo 5. Maybe Maemo 6.