You know what I'm talking about... You get a new device (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile phone), and it's snappy and responsive. Then after about the 8-month mark you notice things are taking more and more microseconds to respond, until you're waiting 4 seconds for something to launch and decide to reflash your OS.

I know I'm currently experiencing that with my Samsung GS3. And we've all seen it in Microsoft products over the years.

Does anyone that's had an N9 for over a year have any review about this issue in particular? Do you find yourself flashing your phone often as a stop-gap measure to fend off sluggish performance? I ask because they're $250 on Amazon and I'm considering finally getting one ^_^ Thanks

I think most of my problems come from me modding stuff and playing with it.

for what its worth, its still great. just a few things can be annoying

No degradation of performance. For my N9 the performance has only somewhat improved during the 1,5 years I've owned it due to slight overclocking. With stock clocks ots the same as new.

I haven't noticed a slowdown. As with others, most of my issues have been from messing with things

Some apps slow down a bit after two years of usage. Gallery app takes longer to load images when swiping around. Email app slows down when imap inbox has over 1200 messages, initial app startup is slower but usage not much different. Overall system is still quite responsive and only these apps have changed behaviour in my usage.

The N9 is not the snapier phone around but I didn't experienced any slowdown over time.

I have mine since day 1 and from time to time, I'm doing some houskeeping : pictures, apps etc.

I haven't experienced slowdowns on Harmattan, WP and iOS.

GS3 bought on launch day have been my last Android and only mobile OS since Symbian where gathering apps seems to slowdown the device.

Though like said above, N9 certainly isn't up for the speed standards of today.

A big part of the N9/50 feeling slower after some time is the flash memory getting dirty.

Flashing solves this, but that's quite the dirty hack.

IIRC, while working on some block stuff for kernel-plus, I saw some stuff patched in for preliminary discard (TRIM) support - was never finished by Nokians.

That's pretty much the main cause of percieved slowdowns - pretty much no packages even bother to jump the hoops to autostart, that's a variable gone.

I have never experienced a slowdown on my N9 in almost 2 years. Of course, YMMV depending on how much modding you are planning to do.

You may consider giving CM a try on your GS3. Wife's on cm-10.2 and is much more responsive than stock (in her own words).

Thanks to everyone's responses, that's great. Although there seems to be a consensus that going from a normal-speed GS3 to a N9 would be like a drop in perceived performance... the N9 is just a slower phone? Overclocking wouldn't help me feel underwhelmed if I replaced my GS3 with it?

Thanks again for all these responses. Maybe I lurk in too many negatively-charged sub-communities on the Internet, but I have to say the Maemo forums have the most helpful people.