Yep. I have an E90 and always used multitasking hard out. I used a JB 3GS 32GB for a while and found it ok until trying to do anything remotely useful .... it just choked. In contrast IMHO the N900 is a completely different league.... what a beast. My move back to Nokia is complete.

I jail broke my iphone and was able to run 2 farting apps quite smoothly at once. 3 farting apps and it wasn't so solid....though
it did run..

I have just seen the QT demos on YouTube for Maemo5/N900 as long as developers get behind it I don't think there will be an issue.

My two cents on the fluidity of the iPhone UI:

1. Prioritization of tasks
- if audio shutters, it is quite annoying
- if you receive a phone call, waiting seconds is not an option to see who is calling or to put the ring on mute
I would imagine these are not handled in Maemo 5.

2. Prioritization of UI fluidity
- you can make certain tradeoffs and those were made in the iPhone
(I'm not talking about multitasking, more what ARJWright wrote)

3. Setting objectives and working towards that without compromise
- Nokia understands many things about mobile and the future. Unfortunately, Nokia does not have the execution capabilities for objective-based working. They release a 100 good ideas a year. Very few of those are actually seen to completion. Nokia prides itself to have a discussion-based culture, a company of many voices. There is no leader.

4. Quality Assurance process
- Nokia has no proper Quality Assurance. I'm not talking about missing functions, I'm talking about not working ones. Each and every one of Nokia's releases is full of bugs (be it Symbian, Maemo or web-services). Partially it is due to having no leader, but there is also a fundamental flaw somewhere in the process. I remember listening to closed-beta testers (bloggers) of some services, like Nokia viNe. Bugs, which were listed 3 months before release were never corrected.

5. Learning curve & consistency
While the posts here about transitions were very good, we miss one additional time factor: the time the user needs to position for the button/UI element. It is dependent on 2 things: unconcious moves and concious ones. If you have elements always at the same place (e.g. top left and right corners of Maemo 5 UI), it becomes second nature to close or submit things. If you group (and force) buttons/UI elements to look the same, it gives a shorter learning curve (confidence) to the user, therefore they will not spend half a minute figuring out what to press. Inconsistency destroys the confidence, so in user's mind all things need to be double-checked.

I believe the whole fluidity thing has nothing to do w screen resolution or GPU or anything like it.

i don't think the op is referring to the amount of pressure required. he's asking the same question i am: why does my £500 device "stutter" when i flip through screens?

then put a plain all black background on all 4 screens, or whatever they're called, and flip through them. the same stuttering.

sure they can. and they will. but they play their game beautifully (which is often not to the benefit of customers). put it this way: if you live in a society that hasn't invened the wheel, and you just happened to do so, would you just start selling it? i wouldn't. i'd offer a square at first, then an octagon etc, all under the desguise of "we're working very hard at improving the performance", then cash in.

too many fools out there that know crap about business and expect everything for free.

Too much concentration on "pretty UI" as opposed to "polished UI". I see the iPhone's UI, albeit "pretty", it's quite polished and consistent.

I cannot say the same for the N97's interface. And I cannot say the same for the N900 either. But taken how Maemo has improved in each iteration from the 770 to the N900, I also cannot say that Nokia has not refined the Maemo interface.

I'll take a polished, consistent UI any day. Let's hope that Moblin's UI is utilized mostly - I found it very usable and refined in its last iteration; moreso than Maemo.

ok I aint read the entire convo but though I throw in my 2 cents worth.

The iPhone UI is so fluid because its so boring to look at, there I said it,

the reason I got rid of my iPhone 3GS was because every time I picked it up I was like, meh?? im board already. yes its smooth and slick, but if any company made a UI that bland and 'didn't' have it running to nicely they would be idiots, why??

- standard 480x320 resolution
- all icons are positioned in exactly the same location and are exactly the same in terms of size of colour depth
- there are no services running which might be using disk or network bandwidth

so its no wonder the iPhone OS is so slick, its because it aint gotta do nothing, plus have you tried using the latest 3.1 OS on a iPhone 3G?? OMG it is soooo sllooowwww and cumbersome to use, my in-law has a 3G and its the equivalent to using an old LG Viewty.

and on to multitasking! can a iPhone 3GS offer multitasking and keep the same responsiveness within the UI, the answer is NO IT CANT, I jailbroke my 3GS and enabled the multitasking plugin, it was not the same, very sluggish and very jittery - which reiterates my statement above, the iphone os is nice and slick because the iphone os is so damn boring to look at and doesn't do anything, except swipe 16 icons from left to right,

there. rant over

The Iphone 2G/3G with a Qualcomm CPU lacks a dedicated GPU, unlike the 3GS. Apple had the choise to either move on and make use of the 3GS' additional power (and thus dropping smooth support for the Qualcomm Iphones) or support all Iphones with a smooth UI, but then, why would they put a dedicated GPU that powerful that it has caused several "explosions" on some devices in the first place? In fact, this might be the reason why they decided to underclock it later on, but I'm not sure about this one.

Anyway, this decision was already made back in 2008 (?) when Apple bought a significant share of the Imagination Technologies stock (known for its PowerVR graphics also used in the N900). With other words, 1 unit N900 sold = 1 cent donation straight to Steve Job's possible liver operations in the future!

iPhone 3GS is a superior device