My look at the N900
So I got the N900 finally. I have to say, if you consider yourself an average power-user and you're looking for a hot new device, skip this one and wait until the next Maemo device comes out later this is year (or more likely, early 2011). That's the pretty much the end of it so if you don't care about the details of why, you can stop now.
The App Library is Lacking
It's kind of expected that there wouldn't be a lot of apps with the new operating system. It doesn't help that the N900 is the only Maemo device on the market and it's not exactly priced for mass consumption. Â Consequently, there are really only a handful of apps sitting in the Ovi Store and you're best bet is to just add the Maemo Extras repository and run through the free database. Maemo Extras is littered with goodies like non-Jabber (AIM, Yahoo, etc.) support, an SSH server, widgets, and media utilities. However, I still don't have a solid game I want to play on my phone not that it really matters...
The Battery Sucks
To be fair, the battery is actually really good. It's just that between the wifi, fm transmitter, 3.5" 800x480 screen, and multi-tasking apps on a 600mhz processor, you tend to run out of power pretty fast. I can't imagine how bad it'd be if I had 3G running. You can easily expected a day with high-moderate/low-heavy usage. Don't expect much more than that though. I'm pretty sure I max out around 26 hours myself. Just for a feeler, I keep the Facebook widget running, an RSS widget, my e-mail synced every hour, the weather widget every 4 hours, and podcast checks once a day, and about 4 IM services connected. That's a lot of passive internet access and processing but easily understandable. During the day I rarely use the GPS but I often use the FM transmitter while I drive. When I used to keep the GPS on for location-based status updates (pretty much a constant GPS line open), I would need to recharge near the end of the day (thinking about 6-8 hours of life). So yeah, if you really push the potential of this device, the battery will easily die before the end of the day.
Interface Quirks
I'm not going to go over something someone has done much better: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=47126
In short, there are some little things that end up bugging you. In the end you get used to it but, I'm sure we'll see things go over smoothly when Maemo 6 rolls around in late 2010.
Hardware Limitations
The N900 is one of the most powerful devices you can snag right now. Unfortunately, without all the restrictions of iPhone and other proprietary locked down devices, you can actually notice slowdown. There seems to be a constant rvalry between my media player and surfing the web. Heaven forbid we add flash and blend the lines together. For some reason, embedded Flash playback performs horribly on the N900. It most-likely has to do with the high-quality video sites like Joystiq, Vimeo, and sometimes Youtube default to. Your best bet is always downloading the video first and playing back it back separately. If you start treating your computer like a modern slimmed down laptop (like I tend to do) then you're going to realize the limits of the 600mhz processor and 128kb of RAM.
Conclusion
The device is awesome. I really like it but with these issues, it's really not an everyman's phone. Tinkering with my phone and the possibility of developing on it makes the N900 a no-brainer pick-up. Anyone else, I'd suggest they stick with S60 or wait until next year to switch to Maemo. If you're still feeling adventerous after that, by all means, pick it up and enjoy the ability to make Skype calls whenever you want (yes it works beautifully over 2.5G).
