Afterplaying with my fathers iPhone 4 this week I am completely baffled why he can snap off these clean, bright, clear photo's as soon as he presses the button. But my N900 photo's always look somewhat blurry and take 2-4 seconds to take from button press. I have a 7 month old that does some cute stuff, but I am never able to take pictures of these cute things because the camera is too slow.

I have tried taking off the auto focus, but this only saves a half second a most. I have aslo tried BlessN900, but that app is about worthless for quality. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get a faster photo out of the phone. How does Apple do it? I under stand the quality cant be improved mush and im fine with that. The quality is ok for me, just the speed kills.

Iphone 4 has a faster processor. Try to overclock your n900 to 1ghz and see if it makes a difference. And also change "swapiness" to 30-50. (read wiki). If you want your camera app to start faster, you should open it at least once. Linux stores everything into ram and when you open some program a second time, it loads it from ram instead of harddrive/flashdrive.

I have been thinking about overclocking my device lately.. but i cant believe that I have a 600 euro device that takes such slow pictures and needs warranty breaking procedures to match a 6 month older device that costs half the price. LAME!

I have compared my pics to those from iphones and all the new HTC phones. Mine are better and sharper.

That is the main reason I stay with Nokia because of the camera. Maybe the droid x can compete but nokia is till the champ.

Can you please post a link to the wiki page that talks about this?

http://wiki.maemo.org/Swap_on_microSD

300€ for an iPhone 4? That is 6months older? Don't you mean 3GS? In sweden N900 costs 450€ and 3GS costs 750€ so it is not really cheaper :P

I don't think it is simply the processor. It must be the software. There are plenty of smart phone (and feature-phones for that matter) which have faster "shutter" speeds than our N900s.

I think quality is controlled mostly by the sensor/chip, but also by software as well. Look at how much better the N900 now handles night pictures.

I think he was talking about his 7 month old son/daughter . :P

It's certainly true that the N900 isn't the snappiest; I'd also like if it were faster. The hardware seems to be excellent, but it's the software which isn't always so good. You mentioned BlessN900, and I find that it sometimes (but not always) produces much better images.

That said, the camera on the N900 isn't bad. In comparison with the iPhone, the N900's camera is a first-class citizen. Slide open the lens and you have a camera, rather than unlocking the device and backing out of apps to get there.