Actually, MeeGo is almost at a point of it being ready for developer and severe power user day-to-day usage. The blockers like PM are being worked on heavily, we even have agps in the pipeline known to work which is probably the last feature that we're waiting for from the hardware perspective.

@slender, I think by random noises he means phone calls.

Heh. I thought that also

Otherwise, maybe Maemo FINALLY landed and got a fart app!

my experience says sound in nitdroid is not as pleasant as in maemo.

The noices and lags while playing music is not related to default music player, but to the design of whole system. If you perform some heavy operations, some parts of the system are colapsing... Try to ungzip 100MB file and browse the web while the file is being uncompressed. Impossible. Try to start download of large file via wifi, and play some random game / music. It will be pain in the ***.

Temporary workaround would be renice-ing the process of mediaplayer. Start mediaplayer, open terminal, and as root user type
Two processes should be found (don't ask me why there are 2 of them)
First number on line is process ID. Chouse one of mediaplayer processes, and do
If it's not helpfull, try any lower number (to -19) or renice the second process too
Lower the number, higher the priority of the process.

There are some good IO mods in this forum too that would probably have a better impact on performancde than changing the processes priority.

Maemo has better active multitasking. It's true android is sometimes hungry with small processes running in the background, but I think with this region Maemo is still king. That means, the mediaplayer will get same treatment as other apps, sometimes causing it to skip.

The native Mplayer in 1.3 hardly ever seems to skip on me, also when running stock frequencies(cpu). At this moment I am even enjoying almoast skip-free music on my stereo whilse transmitting to it via FM on a experimental (non optified) music player only found in devel, whilse at the same time I am running skype and msn protocols and feedingit and microb and active conversations, not even mentioning the smaller processes currently running.

Btw who adds just shoot me to all threads where Android is involved?

I can believe that there is some border-line(or not so border) cases. E.g. maybe case where default PITA scheduled apt-get update cycle kicks in 24h intervals and same time you are browsing (playing flash game) and listening music.

Does Android handle these usage cases any better? 1:1 comparison. Is it really multitasking in these cases or are processes suspended? I do not want to downplay importance of these cases for you or any other user but thing with multitasking is, that everything comes down to: What mostly users do and let´s concentrate to those cases. I do not defend bad usage experience in these cases on N900 and I believe that some processes should always get more slices from cpu, but I do understand that my device doesn´t have infinite power to multi-task. It looks like that closed or sanboxed environments seem to be better in some cases. Take widgets for example. Look what Nokia devels have said in bugzilla, basically if you are bad programmer and core OS doesn´t try to protect itself from misbehaving apps then surely whole device is going to be unusable and we do not care much about it because you as devel suck

I don't know, but sometimes I wish somebody would put him out of his misery.