At the same level of zoom the legibility is clearer on a smaller device even if they fill the screen. I have moved from the HD2 to the Archos 5 Android and they are both weaker at capturing the entirety of things on the screen, legibly.

The DPI is reduced on a bigger screen.

i doubt that nokia will put the latest generation chip in the first meego phone...

While I think Intel and Nokia might have talked about Meego a while, I don't think they would've started on X86 processors until after the Maemo6/Meego Hybrid device was already planned. It's like the N900, the hardware you see in it was planned way earlier than when it was released since that's how long it takes to create, test, and finally push a production device out.

Oh please. A simple mistake? Who are you trying to fool? (yet again). You run a website. Just like most publications on this planet you feed on naive people who wait with anticipation your overhyped and sensationalized stories. Do you think that all these people who waited for your "amazing leak" had nothing better to do?

You could at least have the decency to admit it was intentional.

Yes. Every Nokia employee who showed a photo of the prototype Fremantle device at Maemo Summit 2008 was sure to repeat a string of disclaimers: This is just a prototype. This isn't the final hardware. Remember, this is just a prototype. Pay no attention to the hardware behind this sample UI.

Then, a year later, the N900 turned out to look very much like that prototype we had been told to ignore.

Since there's not any one piece of hardware most geeks own, I don't see how this is a useful line of reasoning. Since "ANYTHING ELSE" is a much wider category, it's utterly unsurprising that more "generic geeks" are on ANYTHING ELSE than on ANY one particular device. That doesn't mean one can't say a device meant nothing "outside the geek community" -- if 1% of geeks have one and like it, and 0% of non-geeks have one and like it, then etuoyo's statement "N900 did not do anything to redress that outside the geek community." is perfectly valid.

It seems as though you're letting your bitterness blur your thinking. Just because you have learned to hate Nokia, doesn't mean much about the geek population in general, but even if Nokia had alienated all geeks who weren't pre-existing Nokia fanboys, that's still irrelevant to the statement you're replying to. The N900 simply hasn't helped Nokia's mindshare outside the geek community.


Besides, while I can't presume to speak for others, the only reason I'm a "Nokia geek" is because I'm a UNIX geek, and back when the Nokia tablets were the only viable pocket computer running a genuinely UNIX-like OS (the Zaurus was already dying, if not yet dead), I bought an N800. Fast-forward a couple years, and the N900 is one of exactly two such options today (Pandora, of course, is the other one, though I have no clue what their status is these days), so I'm still a "Nokia geek". When someone else is shipping better hardware with UNIX as a first-class citizen, I'll likely stop being a "Nokia geek".

So because desktop monitors have stagnated over the past decade, we must all be content with them?

And even if we assume desktop monitors are good enough, we use them at significantly greater distances than phones/tablets -- better than a desktop doesn't mean anything.


Yes. And, Mr. Jobs's lies notwithstanding, neither the iPhone 4 nor N900 is there yet. Every time I've seen someone do the math to justify the "retina display" tag, they slide from cycles/inch (where each cycle is a black/white line pair) to pixels/inch (where a pixel is either black or white, and you need two of them to make a cycle). Whether through incompetence or deception, that factor of two pushes the threshold of pixel-invisibility down somewhere around 600ppi, not 300ppi.

And really, people (by which I mean me ) were arguing for better PPI before the iPhone 4 came out. With the N900, we did get a somewhat increased PPI, although rather than being used to increase pixel count or to put a d-pad next to the display, it was wasted to shrink the device from the perfectly usable size of the N810. That makes 800x480/4" a step backward, when we should be moving forward...

this dpi rubbish is a joke. people have been getting along just fine with the really poor resolution and dpi of the iphone 3gs. why has dpi become important all of a sudden, is it the iphone 4 hype? I'm all for higher numbers but people are completely irrational with it, anybody viewing this page on an 900 should zoom out and switch to portrait mode then tell me why you would honestly need a higher dpi when you look at that text. in fact, I would simply ask for a larger screen because IMO that extra power required to render any extra pixels above WVGA on that size screen are not worth it. I would much rather have it put to better use.

The same whole page of a complex reference PDF or webpage e.g front page of gsmarena.com can be read with full legibility on a iphone 4 in portrait vs a n900 or similar device which needs zooming in.

True or false?

false because that same text is legible on the n900 if you take out a microscope, it is at a very, very uncomfortable reading size (i'm talking even smaller than the shadiest legal notice) like I said turn the n900 into portrait mode and zoom out the text is still readable if you concentrate on the text which is about 1mm tall but it becomes stupid to read text at that size.

True. No, False! True. Could you please use it in a sentence.