The Sad News first. I sold my N900 to fund my purchase of the new Samsung Galaxy S running Android 2.1

Its been 11 months with the N900 and I thought now was the best time to upgrade to a better spec phone and the apprantly leading OS Android.

First the phone design. I like the N900. Its prefect there are no buttons on the screen amd the minimal buttons on the outer shell.

Its great to use and its easier to type using the keyboard plus you can view the whole screen whilest typing.

Now the Galaxy S is a great design, really thin and you wont even know its in your pocket.

I dislike the touch sensitive buttons. When you hold the screen landscape, its so thin that you are bound to touch the edge or rather should I say the edge on the front panel which houses the touch sensitive button, which means you are more prone to press back when viewing something landscape.

Well the Phone itself is not the real problem, its the OS Android.

On the N900 I use multiple apps, Multitasking is so essential that today I understand why I usually favour Symbian over other OS's.

On the N900 (since football is back HOORAY!!) I listen to radio 5 live through the browser, whilst on messenger/messages and viewing the Forums on the web at the same time. I can also switch between them without any problem. When I dont need to view anything I turn off the sreen whilst all the APPS are running and I can listen to 5 live through the browser.

Now bringing the Spotlight onto Android. There is an update releasing soon called Android 2.2 which will bring FLASH 10.1

So at the moment lets look at Android 2.1

The web browser is lightning fast and a joy to use since all mapges instantly load fully. Now you can open multiple tabs but the user interface is not great.

There is Android Market which hosts loads of Apps.

Since there is no FLASH (coming in next update) you can view Youtube through an App.

Now I can view the videos fine but cannot switch to another app or even turn off the screen whlist expecting the Youtube App to be running.

There is No Native Multitasking, So if you want to switch from an App it will pause or stop the App to allow you to switch. You can hit the Home button which displays your last few Apps you used.

So I cannot listen to radio through browser with the screen turned off

If you download something using rapidshare etc and switch from the browser to anything else it will either pause or stop the download.

There is some multitasking, you can open up the Music player and another app. If you decide to switch from the other app which could be the browser then it will pause/stop the browser for you to switch to the Music Player. Multitasking is limited and Sucks.

You cannot even close down apps, you have to download a kill task app to do it.

In fact if you view about 20 pages in your browser then you need to click back 20 times for it to go to back to the start and eventually close.

Im waiting for the new update Android 2.2 but I doubt it will address themultitasking issue or any other issues which to me are a deal breaker.

If things dont improve I will go back to the N900 and Maemo.

Id like to hear your views on your experience with Android in comparison to Maemo and which one would you prefer.