wait. how come i get a warm and fuzzy feeling from this thread, that's not normal on TMO. oh, i peed my pants, that's why.

You're welcome.

I felt exactly the same yesterday, but didn't have time to post here. Felt the need to say thank you for all of you that have made my n900 so wonderful!!

Warm and fuzzy pee is now the new "obligatory trout".

Trolling


cool story bro

...for folks upset with Maemo phones.

That's a big difference. What geneven purchased first was an N800. Not a phone, savvy?

I was in the same maemo freshman class as geneven. I bought the N800 on the first day for the same reasons and also with very little research.

I bought it because it was Linux but not because that was an OS I was familiar with. I bought it because Linux was an OS that I wanted to learn but didn't have the time or resources available to dedicate a desktop machine to a Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

At that time I had already been in the handheld device world for 3 years and didn't like the way WinMo was going. The cost of upgrading hardware as well as development time and licensing of proprietary applications used by the service industry was skyrocketing. This seem to be simply because M/S took a whole 'nother direction every 18 months with additional hardware required with each step and no support for legacy devices.
There are still plenty of service companies out there running WinMo 2002 on b/w handheld devices because of this.

In a lot of ways Linux was a viable answer to this Windows Mobile mess.

I used my new N800 and the many members of this forum and community to learn as much as I could. And just like my classmates gerbick and geneven, I am also very grateful to this organization for the experience.

Research wasn't required just desire.

This whole "What did you expect?" vs. "For the money I paid I can't believe it doesn't have the same user experience as my girl friends Jesus phone" crapolla didn't come about until Maemo was also a phone.

If you were going to use anything as your primary means of communicating with the world and what you do depends on your ability to communicate in a timely fashion, you best do some research before choosing your device.

I have had my N900 since the first day it was available to me and I use it everyday. I rely on it for many things and have a consistent 3G connection where I live, work, and play. In time and energy, my N900 has paid for itself many times over. I am very happy with it.

However, I have never, ever used it as a phone. I don't even know if the the phone side worked when I bought it.

Perhaps I made the wrong conclusion, but to -me- it looked like geneven said that he didn't do the research, whereas everyone else did. From all the previous posts I've seen here, this means that the poster's upset, as several people have helpfully pointed out.

Admittedly, it's sort of ambiguous - Something like "I bought the n800 based solely on the fact that it ran Linux, and I've loved it ever since." would have been a much better message, and prevented any ambiguity - On this forum, it's almost required.

I too never ever regretted buying the N900. It was worth the money and if I could redo it, I would buy it all over again. This phone opened the world of linux to me. Like you I never could afford to have my only desktop running linux, since everything at school is windows based.

Before my N900, I had only tried linux in a virtual machine. The N900 is a wonderful piece to mod and play with. In the beginning I would hardly use xterm, but now I think I use it more than a GUI. I can honestly say that if my N900 breaks, I will try to buy another one. None of the other devices on the market are appealing. The N900 with its wonderful OS set the bar too high up. You may disagree of course. There have been many disappointed users, but to me it's the best thing there currently is.

Development on the N900 is raging right now. There was a period near the PR1.2 that development slowed down. When I say development I don't mean of normal apps and games, but of changes that affect usability in a big way. In a few short months we have had fcamera, hostmode and preenv. These are huge developments. There is also psx4m which has picked up progress. Not to mention the many other small and extremely useful apps like 'app search widget', 'series finale', 'fbreader', 'hermes' and many more. All of which the developers are amongst us, asking for input and feedback and they release it open sourced for the world to use. I don't think any other OS including webOS has these types of apps. Most other OS you'd have to pay another 100 € to use the apps you need.

One of the best thing the N900 introduced to was these forums. I learned a lot from here. We have everything anyone can want from here from experts, helpers, greeters, fanboys, trolls, fanatics, idealists, geniuses, average joes etc..

But unlike you, YoDude, I have used the N900 as a phone. And it works wonderfully. I can call anyone, without problems. And I can sms anyone, with the useful threaded sms feature. I never has a problem doing that. Any other thing..I have never used before..so of course I didn't miss them. I never sent MMS (which in Malta with the 100kb limit is worse than useless). And I never used things like dedicated ringtones or speed dialing. Although I think there are workarounds and solutions for these thanks to developers. I don't know for sure as I don't need them. But the N900 never failed to do those two tasks (call and sms). What other thing should a phone do??

I didn't mean to imply that from my research I determined that the N900 shouldn't be my phone. The reality is that I never tried. If phone service was included in the price I pay for just DATA, I'd be a fountain of phone specific posts spouting off at the slightest annoyance and requesting various work arounds... Perhaps a fountain of sorrow, if you will.

I don't know.

What I do know is that I would still use another smaller, lighter, and faster phone as my primary.

What I do depends on phone communication and there are times when I do not need full internet access and do not want to expose an expensive device to the sand at the beach, the drunks at a bar, or various elements of the great outdoors while on R & R.

The reason my original response was worded the way it was is that I was responding to one message, which maybe I should have specified. It said that the reason we were enlightened is that we must have done our RESEARCH before buying our device. I think that is a cliche and isn't really true. Without direct experience, I think it's pretty much impossible to get an exact idea whether a certain device works acceptably for you, especially for unique hardware such as the N800, N810 and N900.

So I just took a chance on the N800 -- it sounded cool. I think that was the correct attitude -- none of this thorough advance knowledge for me. That's why I cringe whenever it is repeated -- and of course it has been repeated thousands of times -- that you need to do your research before you buy something. I just don't think that is true. Of course you need to do SOME research, but that isn't all. You need to be open to new experience, and if you rely on research only you will be in an eternal cycle of repeating the same experience time after time, but you will not break through into new things if you are only trying to replicate the same old experiences but better.

I suspect that for many critics of the N900, they are unhappy because it didn't meet their fantasies, and they have been unable to adjust to the real thing. Still, I think that taking the plunge, stepping off into the unknown, is necessary at some point, especially if you want adventure along with your experience.