Originally Posted by xanderx

Just to not become a "former" N900 user, I recently bought another to have repair parts in case of an accident with the main one.

Originally Posted by dylanemcgregor

So I wasn't ever a diehard n900 user. I have an N800 that was my primary device for a number of years, and I had an n900 that I used for about 6 months regularly before moving to a Galaxy Note 2. That being said, here are my thoughts.

1) Keyboard - Android has a good variety of onscreen keyboards, and I don't find typing speed to be a worry for most "normal" usage. I use a keyboard called Kii, which has the ability to use Swype typing, but also lets you add in a dedicated number row and generally has more keys. I also use Hacker's Keyboard which has all the keys in the standard place and you can do keyboard shortcuts with it. All in all I think I'm actually faster with the onscreen keyboard for most things than I would be with a physical keyboard. For me, the big problem is that the onscreen keyboard just covers to much of the screen, many times covering up what you are trying to see. For instance, when I'm typing a search query into a search engine, the suggestions that appear below the search box are almost always covered by the keyboard. I'd probably be happier with slower typing speed, as long as I could see the entire screen when I was typing.

2) Can't really comment on the camera, as I really only use mine as part of another app. like scanning checks for deposit.

3) Multitasking on Android just sucks. After years with Maemo devices I still can't get used to the crappy way they handle multitasking even after 6 months with my Note 2.

4) Offline maps, there is an open source program called OSMAnd -that uses Open Street Maps for offline navigation. I've downloaded it, but haven't really had the opportunity to use it for much yet, but I've read really good things about it.

5) I didn't get a chance to use Conboy very much, but I'd be surprised if you had a hard time finding a good note taking app for Android. Spreadsheets also seem to work fine. Gnumeric was fine the little bit I used it, but the GN2 screen size really comes in handy when working with spreadsheets and the software hasn't ever gotten in my way, and I haven't run into any Excel compatibility issues (but I haven't thrown any complicated sheets with VBA to it yet). My bigger issue with any kind of office work is that Android doesn't seem to have been built with a transparent file system in mind, so even though you can download a bunch of file managers to navigate through files, most programs don't really give you the ability to save a file where ever you want it.

All in all I can do what I need to do with Android, but using it is more frustration than pleasure. If I was in a position right now where I needed to move to a new platform I think I'd probably look at BB10 before Android. My boss got a Z10 a bit ago, and while I haven't used it extensively, I've really liked what I've seen so far and I think it will continue to get better with the next couple of updates.

If I could afford to wait a bit I'd look towards the end of the year and see what Jolla's phone looked like, and if anything was available from Ubuntu, Mozilla, or Tizen by that time.

Originally Posted by Flandry

Thanks, really appreciate your comments. I'll take a look at the new BB and see how it looks. Never thought i'd take BB seriously as an OS...

I had really hoped that android would evolve into a more "complete" OS over time, but i guess that hasn't really been a design goal for Google.