We have not seen anything yet. Smartphoners expecting high-end phone function will swarm on this board like fruit flies to spilled Pepsi.

People can laugh now, but you might not be later

Commenting in the videos is disabled because I don't want the usual iPhone forever vs you're a mactard debate. Simple videos take them as you may.

2 more videos are added. The purpose of these videos is to compare browser rendering and general user experience. Cut the comments about fanboys, trolls etc.

1. iPhone 3Gs running maemo.org and engadget while a podcast is playing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcHOd-iEEJM

2. N900 running maemo.org and engadget while music is playing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEnRTbRqYwg

The browser crashed in the video so let's see who's trolling.

A couple of things I have noticed about the Maemo browser:

1. Larger text makes it work smoother (less text on the screen to render at 1 time I assume)
2. Scrolling up produces more checker patterns than scrolling down.
3. Seems to be slightly faster after the site has been sitting there for a while.

If I have time I will add windows mobile to the mix as well...which will be extremely embarrassing.

Don't complain about video quality because they are still 'processing' whatever that means

Gotta tell you man its sounding more and more like your device is the problem - have you thought about reflashing it?

Also try to stay on topic. This is not a debate about me or my expectations. I have 8+ smartphones laying around on my desk so I would say that my expectations were VERY correct.

And you are basing this on what? Let's see a video on your device going to the same sites and I'll think about flashing it. Do you even have your phone yet? hmmm.

Stay classy. It pays off at some point in life

The fact that no one else is reporting these issues except one first time poster no one ever heard of before and the fact the several other people have in fact reported the exact opposite of your experience. But hey man whatever you do doesnt really affect me. You come onto community forums with a post titled to annoy people off the bat. You refuse to listen to anyones offers of help or suggestions - preferring instead to waste your time making mini dramas filming other phones, when you could be spending that time doing even basic triage or reflashing and confirming once and for all that it is your build/device or a broader issue.
You wasted 100 dollars to get your device a few days earlier and now you are angry at the world that it doesnt live up to your expectations.

Oh and I have 4 smart phones with 4 diff OS's within arms reach of me - does that make me special as well?

God I hate people who feel the need to play My dicks bigger than yours

I wouldn't laugh if browser on my N900 had crashed.
Btw, could you reply on my previous post?
I see interesting that even Engadget found N900's browser better than iPhone's. That says a lot.

Well typically, modern hardware acceleration uses a 3d capable chip, and pixel operations tend not to be the primary bottleneck nowadays. They can still be a bottleneck, for example if you're drawing lots of blended layers on top of each other, but it's quite different from the old days where you did everything you could to minimise the number of pixels written.

Basic pixel filling by 3d chips is pretty darn fast. So rendering algorithms these days don't try to minimise pixels; they try to minimise lots of other things, including pixels in the overall balance but not so much.

Did I mention that pixels are drawn in parallel with CPU calculations deciding what to send the GPU? So drawing 4 times the pixels does not mean taking 4 times as long for the render, any more.

I say typically. I don't know what the 3d chip and memory is like in the N900. It might be a rubbish one

If it's anything like the Intel Poulsbo debacle, which uses a similar 3d core from the same company, it'll be reasonably good performance (though not latest Nvidia/ATI class), with awful drivers that don't take advantage of it's features despite being closed source. Let's see if Nokia had better luck getting proper drivers for it than regular Linux users have managed (or even Windows users apparently) on Intel Poulsbo chipsets.

From the videos, it looks like the N900 is having no difficulty actually drawing any part of the web page to the screen. That's supported by watching the ball game videos, where the whole 3d scene is running quite smoothly. Much smoother than these scrolling web pages, in fact, despite being a full screen 3d render.

So it looks like the slowness is in calculating what to draw, and with images it's possibly decompressing them on demand into a cache. You can see all that because when the delay finishes and it does finally get round to drawing, it fills in everything rather quickly.

I agree. If there was only one browser I'd look forward to doing that But it turns out there are several alternative browsers already in the pipeline. I'm confident at least one of them will have very smooth scrolling. (And if there isn't, I see an app waiting to be written ) It looks like a microb problem more than a device problem - similar visual artifacts to rendering on Netscape Navigator 4 and IE 4.

I agree, those videos show a clear difference in scrolling and general rendering speed between the two devices.

However, it's a mistake to dwell on this even though it's going to be a big part of the "feel" of the device for new users.

It looks to me like a software problem, not a hardware problem. And not an especially hard software problem either.

The browser scrolling - and crash - will be fixed, one way or another. Either by updates, or replacement with another browser, and there are several other browser groups eager to please so there's a healthy competition to do a good job.

That's a key difference from the iPhone. You can count on healthy competition among browser people keen to impress, to try and get the most out of the hardware in time.

You may find that's a big part of the different philosophy between this phone and the others. This one can expect continuous improvement once it's released, independent of what Nokia does. Especially in areas that lots of users care about. The others are at the whim of their parent company.

So, expect it a bit like desktop Linux distros operate: imperfect in many areas that you can see, but expect to enjoy the pleasure of regular improvements without having to pay for them.

That is totally due to the community and open sourceness.

Once you (or any user) "gets" the difference in philosophy, you may find yourself dwelling less on specific but superficial irritations (the scrolling doesn't stop you using it), focusing less on the "what can it do out of the box", and more interested in what it's going to do when a lot of people get up to speed seriously developing stuff for it. Unlike the other devices, this community and Nokia's seemingly good relationship with it means we can improve more of the "core" user experience that we're allowed to on other devices.

Let's move on from scrolling: The browser is quite capable as browsers go on a phone, isn't it?