The extensive and detailed Michal Jerz preview of the N900 at My-Symbian (http://my-symbian.com/other/preview_n900.php) showed up what seems to be a HUGE PROBLEM in this otherwise terrific device. Jerz found out that in spite of the huge 32gb of internal memory, only 256mb are defined for "installable aplications", as you can see in the picture below. Well, if this limitation happens to be maintained in the final N900 release, we can say it will be an ENORMOUS DRAWBACK in the device, since Jerz was able to easily fill the entire 256mbs dedicated to 3rd party software, and needed to uninstall several programs in order to test new ones. How come does Nokia do that to a device with so much potential? Does Nokia desire to bury the pontenciality of the N900 right from scratch, just like it did to the N97 which could have been a cutting edge smartphone but, instead, was granted the outdated ARM11 with no GPU and only 128Mb of RAM?

Hi! This has been discussed with the previewer and members of the community at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=32182&page=9 (somewhere around that page).

no you'll have 1gb to install stuff, possible 2gb, and if you're an enterprising fellow you could have more than that

Yea i don't understand why memory can't be shared across the board...just like a PC. If i have 32GIG of memory, I know i can rely on it for application installation and not just dedicated to video and photos ect.. Maybe they dedicated certain segment of memory in order to speed up the loading process...but you're right...whatever it maybe, the app memory shouldn't be that low. I am betting that it is not the final stage of development. Maybe that's why they delayed it to modify it and iron out other things too.

Yes, it'll be different in the production device. No, this is not a reason for delay.

If the N900 is really a mobile computer as Nokia advertises it, there should be NO separate memory for applications at all! We should be able to use its 32gbs with whatever we want - applications, data or documents. If I can do that with my humble 5800XM, why can't we in a powerful linux mobile computer??

Because it's a _mobile_ computer and people will want to attach it to their non-mobile computer via USB. This only works if the data and the OS are on different partitions due to technical reasons.

Probably because applications need to be on the ext3 filesystem, which is not readable in windows (unless using a special driver or other software), whereas the documents and other media can work fine from a FAT filesystem, and then can be read by almost any other OS when plugged in via USB.

Choose: ability to use the device as a Windows-compatible mass storage device, or ability to use the full 32 GiB for apps.

You'll be able to change between the two by reformatting the internal card at your pleasure. This is the reason this device is a mobile computer, and not because Nokia put this or forgot to put that.

because it is linux! the os and the applications are stored on a seperate partition formatted with linux file system (ext3)
The mass-storage partition is formatted with a FAT32(?) filesystem to be compatible with windows. If the whole filesystem was formatted with ext3 (in order to use it as application memory), there would be no usb mass storage for windows computers.
The same applies to desktop PCs: i have two dedicated partitions, one for windows and one for linux.

However it might be possible to change the size of the partition. i assume the community will figure it out.

EDIT: whoops! 2 posters where faster than me.i definitly need to type faster