I am selling my N900 after using it intensively for three days while being in NY as a tourist and having it now for more than three weeks in total. I support Linux, I love Maemo and I fell in love with the N900, however:

The App Manager

is very sensitive to multiple inputs. Installing / Deinstalling programs works, but first of all the status messages not are not synchronized and so irritating for the user, as one clicks many times to get a reaction which can mess up the system. In my first experiences it crashed the whole device taking all resources, till I rebooted it. The solution is to be patient and not to click too much till something happens, but this is far from being user friendly and intuitive.
I think implementations on Ubuntu are much better and robust, showing the current status of installation / catalog update / deinstallation properly, more work has to be be done here.


The Conversations App

Conversations is a great app. The two most irritating things are why is there no Emails support for conversations? (Or Am I doing something wrong). And why did Nokia not finish the IM support for ICQ or MSN, or similar, which you can find in any common chat software. I installed the telephathy-haze extras (which you are not supposed to do) and it seems to work flawlessly.

The Modest Email Client

I like modest, it is minimal and somewhat fast, renders also HTML and I like the compose window. But besides missing smaller features like autocomplete mail addresses input and a spam filter the missing search function is just unjustifiable. How Am I supposed to find anything with huge mail boxes you have nowadays. This feature is so obvious that I really blame people for not having it implemented.

The MircoB Browser

Even though I am somewhat impressed, that browsing is similar to a normal computer and even goes beyond that with the "panorama" history it is far from being a nice experience. It starts from zooming using pitching which moves the web page around, goes over a missing back button (swipe?) and ends with flash sites, which totally kill your system.
For example: In NY I looked for a Ralph Lauren store using best buys free WiFi. The Ralph Lauren store location website seems to be flash heavy, it was nearly impossible to access it. Finally I used google to find the store nearby whereas google redirected me to the Ralph Lauren Flash site. It was possible to read the correct address but the whole system totally slowed down. Only after closing the open tab it was possible to work again normally. Another disappointing thing is the missing support for good plug-ins like weave. Before I bought the N900 I saw the Fennec Video with Weave plugin which I think is really really cool. But now, having the N900, it makes you realize it was more show than working. MicroB does not support Weave and the Fennec Beta 5 is even slower than anything else. Essential more work has to be done here.

The OVI maps

Do not let me get even started. I read today through the ovi maps improvement suggestions but IMHO OVI maps just has to be redone completely. If you read through all the brainstorm suggestions the only conclusion you can get is that OVI is not capable of anything right now. From my own experience: Ovi is damn slow overall. Not only the boot up which can take more than 30s, the whole scrolling through the spare menus takes too much time. Even searching is not smooth. Due to the fact that OVI is a very minimalistic application (find or route) one could expect a high performance, but this application slows down the whole system and is just unusable. While walking through NY I could not use it at all. When I was on the street it complained it could not load the maps without WiFi, also I thought OVI map caches the data. When I was inside a cafe with wireless I could not get a GPS signal. Seriously, I had to stand outside of the cafe to get a GPS signal and access map data. This was one of the most annoying moments with my N900. (Having a data plan might simplify things, but as a tourist one cannot always have wifi access everywhere.)

The OVI Store

Even though this is not related to the N900 specifically, where is the official OVI store, the Apple App Store pendant? With Nokias market share it should be easy to catch up with the 100000+ apple apps, but the Ovi store for the N900 is not even online?! It looks like Nokia made a huge strategical mistake and has a terrible website team. As my friend tried to order one N900 on the Nokua USA store, they charged his credit card twice and he did not even received one confirmation! He had to call the bank to remove charges for resulting overdraft fees. As we called the Nokia support about that they said they are aware of this problems.

Smaller annoyances

• The whole system hangs sporadically / slows down
• WPA max key length field of 64 digits, whereas one need 65
• The MfE 2003 debacle
• No button for manually setting up a WiFi with the router in automatic setup mode, whereas the "Press button on router to connect..." message is in most cases totally useless, as there is no access to the device and should not be default
• A few others I do not remember yet

.

Conclusion:

Am I the only one who thinks Nokia made crucial mistakes and fools somewhat the customer to provide him / her with such a beta status device?

I know things are getting better in future releases, they better very very soon. But all of the mentioned points are reasons I wanted to have a mobile computer for. But for know there is no reason to keep the device till there is a new firmware release with many bugfixes and hopefully lots of performance improvements. I also really waiting for the OVI store and some comercial but useful apps. But all in all I feel it will take quite some time.


Disclaimer: Do not get me wrong with my opinion about the Maemo programmers. Most of the mentioned issues are due to organization and planning issues from Nokia's site. I really appreciate all hard work the community does and hopefully I can participate soon too. One day we all might laugh about this. Hopefully.

Appreciate any comments.

i suppose in a way..

i remember whaen i bought my iphone 3g(was never ever gonna buy a 2g device and bought the 3g straight away)it run really well- but each firmware realise almost made it a different phone..

nokia hasnt really started in the best place.. but the phone is still great..

by the way what are you gonna buy-- obviously not another n900

I just stay without a smart phone for a couple of weeks. I will survive, as I did not have one so far. I am going buy a N900 soon though. Not before any firmware upgrade.

so are you selling or buying?

I am selling mine right now at ebay, I am going to buy one in a couple of weeks.

why didnt you try and get a full refund

or just hold on to it.

you will loose out money for no reason at all dude

You win "Most Confusing Thread Title"....congratulations

I wont go into the conflicting items in this post - but what I will say is that I just went to Ralph Laurens web site and had zero problems - responded quickly, was able to not only search for a store but bring up the map and pan around on both the road and 3d building view.

Unsure why you have such trouble

If everyone gave up on the first gen iphone with os 1.0, there would be no massive iphone market now with all those apps.

There wasn't "an app for that" for a whole year, don't forget...

I've found the device to be usable with obvious limitations, but not unreasonable ones. Flash is slow on the n900, but *still* not even available on the iPhone.

I dunno... it's a first release of a very complex OS that clearly has the ability to grow into something amazing. You buy in now for a couple reasons - but "mature out of the box experience" probably isn't one of them.

the iphone one was like this phone at the mo..

neither are meant to make money, there are try outs- they are product development- we are guinea pigs..

a second gen was already in development at the s\me time as iphone 2g


the next gen nokia will b awesome and the third even better- if they go trhe same way as apple.. which hopefully will happen- because this phone is pushing boundaries