Can't you just run Pandora directly out of the browser?

Yes, but this has quite a few disadvantages: 1) the flash app takes forever to load. 2) it eats up about 80% CPU and starts stuttering as soon as I do anything else with the N900 (and sometimes all on its own). 3) it's a much less convenient interface for quickly hitting thumbs up/down or next track as you go about doing other stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I love having flash in the browser! This is not the one to show off to your friends though.

I have a few questions for those who have the device.

Firstly, is the scrolling in the browser as bad as people whine about in the "yes, it sucks thread"?

Secondly, since exchange is not working yet, is there any way to sync with google calendar and contacts as well as gmail?

I have no idea what those people are talking about. Sure, this is, what double the resolution of what an iPhone is displaying on the same processor, if there is a lot of stuff on the screen in a fast scrolling motion I can at least imagine that maybe it skipped a frame? But it moves really fast and really good. I have no complaints.

I was just looking at the front page of CNN.com and it works great.

I went to YouTube, again works great. Opened a video and still the scrolling is smooth while the video is playing - what happens then, is that the video does skip a few frames while I'm scrolling the screen around madly with the stylus. But the screen itself is scrolling nicely along with the rest of the content, and audio continues to play from the video well.

Those "yes it sucks" threads are just trying to grab attention. By no means is this phone "garbage".

What it is - though - is a step short of where Maemo needs to be for mass adoption, but this should be no news to anyone here. Great hardware running great operating system and browser, with incomplete rest.

There are two separate issues. The scrolling itself is a little bit jerky, but to me this is barely noticeable. I'm fine with it as it is.

There is also some slowness in the rendering of page content, especially for very large and complicated pages. This is what causes the checkered pattern to show up. In my opinion there is some room for improvement here, but it's not terrible.

I'm able to use MfE if I tell it to sync just the calendar. I got my contacts to sync one time, but haven't had any luck since then. For email I'm stuck with IMAP for the time being. YMMV.

Thanks for the reply. I dont like the iPhone and I dont like comparing everything to it. Ive had it for a few months, but got tired so in the mean time Ive had the HTC Touch Pro 1/2, HTC G1 and HTC Hero, so thats the devices I will be comparing N900 to once I get it.

But the broken exchange really worries me as it means I wont get push email, calendar and contacts through Google, which is one of the features I really depend upon on my mobile phone.

Just to clarify, is exchange support broken or missing?

Exchange support is there, but I guess some have had problems with it?

Yeah. It seems like Nokia only tested it with Exchange 2007.

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5597

I'm glad to see that this bug has now been marked high priority.

Played Bounce Evolution while the media-player was playing MP3s. I think a few frames skipped especially when the media-player was changing songs, but otherwise the game worked fine multi-tasking.

It is actually quite amazing how sharp the game graphics are. Much better resolution than on the iPhone/iPod touch and it shows.

ive played with the phone its great. I hated it with a passion at first but after a week or so of using it ilove it. However it is massive so im not going to buy one and just going to wait for the N900 mini in feb march time