So their worldphones are only for roaming outside the US? Then what about the HTC Touch Pro 2? Verizon offers that and it's quad band GSM on their site. Same for Blackberry Storm, Blackberry Tour, Blackberry Storm 2... and a few others.

Ok, this I didn't know. Thanks.

I didn't realize this.

Would this potentially cause a battery hit in comparison to 3g networks that use only a single band?

It seems like it could potentially improve performance to.

Every 3G bands have to use two different bands for the upload and download. Like the EURO 2100 even if it is only called 2100 it is actually using somewhere in 19XX for the upload and somewhere in 21XX in download. It all depends on how they explain it or how they imprint it.
For better clarification please refer to this

First of all let me ask the mods why this thread has not been moved to competitors section? If I mention anything remotely related to Apple or iPhone in my threads they get immediately moved there.

Secondly, peope who have smoked the Nokia pot, wake up. The N900 is a great device, much better than the average. But it is not market leader in many ways. Basically it's a half baked device. Let's start with hardware:

1. Screen. It has a good resolution and color. Sensitivity is good. How much extra would've cost to apply the oleophobic layer on it like the 3GS'es? $2 bucks, five tops.
2. Camera. It is better than the 3GS but worse than many other Nokia's. 5MP is pretty average. Lots of phone cams are now 8MP. New Sony-Ericcson has 12MP. Where is the optical zoom? Regular P&S cameras half the width of the N900 have 3X optical zoom.
3. Keyboard. Good typing on it. Worse than BlackBerry. Controversial (learnable though) location of space bar. 3 rows of keys. Could've easily been 4 like the Droid's or most other smart phone's.
4. Speakers. Good but worse then N95's.
5. CPU. Same as 3GS. Could've been 1GHz SnapDragon.
6. Storage. Same as 3GS with expandable. Noone will use that feature because one must remove the batter to replace the microSDHC card. Why isn't there an external slot?
7. Browser. Better than Safari. No portrait support (yet). Again a half baked solution.
8. Phone hw: better than 3GS. No North American frequency support for 3GS except T-mobile. I thought that frequency tuners are eletronic, so whatever chip Nokia uses should be programmable to so frequencies yet it's not.
9. Overall build quality: on par with 3GS
10. OS: better than 3GS
11. Available software: 3GS wins

trolltastic! at least get your facts straight.

sim card is behind the battery. microsdhc is next to the battery and accessible without battery removal

Though I would have preferred an external slot. Heck I would've preferred the use of an SD slot instead of microSD. There's no point in a 1 Ghz Snapdragon since the Snapdragon takes care of all functions (audio, gpu, etc..). While the N900 and the iPhone both use the 600 Mhz for CPU, while offloading the GPU and audio work to dedicated processors. For example, right now Flash 9 uses the CPU mainly (hence why some sites like Hulu don't work well on the N900). But Flash 10 offloads the work to the GPU.

Correction: remove the battery is incorrect. Just pried open my N900. All you have to do is to take the back cover off by risking to break the little plastic flaps around the edges. Definitely not a daily task.

I am writing this from my N900. Did a test of 3g speeds btw N900 (tmobile) and my iPhone 3GS, which is on att, as I traveled from NJ to northern OH along interstates.

att has much better coverage and I was often getting 2 Mbs download. Tmo would only get 3g every once in a while and even then would top 900 kbs. Interestingly, upload would be higher on tmo than on att, about 340 kbs vs 280.

Of course, that has not much to do with the device. On the other hand, if its potential is limited by the only provider one can use it on in the US, that tends to reflect poorly on the device as well.

My other qualm is the email client. It is beyond poor, completely unusable. It takes about 30-45 sec to retrieve a message (imap) and then it often freezes. Email is a fairly essentiqal fumction so one would hope to have the basics done right the first time around. iPhone's email client is, on the other hand, quite robust and usable.

So, while I would love to replace iphone with N900, for everyday smartphone use iphone is still ahead by a large margin.

Ok, I'm curious. Any of you out there using a n900 in a T-mobile high speed 3.5G area? I'm in FL, in one of the 3.5G areas. I'm currently on AT&T myself, but a co-worker of mine is on T-mobile with a G1. Sitting in the same office, I was pulling 500kbs off of one of the speed test sites (the large file test), while he was getting 5Mbs off of the same site, same file size. Real world speed/bandwidth anyone?

snedley, sorry if this is a stupid question:

Can the 3G bands be updated through a firmware update, or are bands part of the hardware? In other words; could a firmware update potentially allow AT&T users to get 3G?