N900 vs Desire Z (aka G2)

I had a G2 aka Desire Z ("DZ") for nearly 6 months, on loan from employer, and I had to give it back recently. I've been able to borrow an n900 for a few weeks to see what it's like, I've never had a n900 before, only a 770 and n800.

I rooted the DZ and installed Virtuous Unity, an excellent custom ROM offering the very latest HTC packages on gingerbread, repackaged for the DZ.


So a few thoughts.

I found the capacitive screen on the DZ very responsive, sometimes too easy to accidentally brush it, and it took a little while to not touch it accidentally.

I tried a capacitive stylus on the DZ but it was basically like a pencil eraser and wasn't really all that useable, it simply wasn't accurate enough to use the DZ for drawing or sketching, whereas the n900 makes this effortless. I'd be interested to try the HTC Flyer tablet and its magic pen to see if that works.

Both devices have very useable keyboards, lacking a number row. I prefer cursor keys on the n900 to the touchpad thingy on the DZ as they're more precise.

The slider on the n900 seems more robust than the DZ, but I didn't actually have any problems with it.

The DZ has a sharper brighter screen, but doesn't work well in direct sunlight at all, I haven't tried the n900 yet as the weather's not been good enough!

The DZ's speaker is very poor, noticeably a lot worse than my Nokia E71, just about useful for a telephone call or a podcast, but is not loud enough, if you install a volume booster you can make it usefully louder but then it distorts!

The DZ's headphone output was very low, it seems to be a design fault, I had to install a volume booster app which overrides the system default limits on the sound mixer!

The DZ allows tethering in various ways, to use the DZ over wifi or usb to share its 3G, or, to use the PC as an internet connection.

The DZ's CPU is clearly much faster than the n900's; the accelerated graphics make it feel slick and responsive.

The DZ has no kickstand, I did find a place in the USA which sells cases for it with a kickstand, but they wouldn't ship outside the USA.

The DZ's camera is not too bad, but nothing like as good as the n900. However, android made it trivial to push photos into picasa, and upload videos to youtube.

The DZ's GPS was pretty good, and google maps was excellent, a recent update allowing local storage of map squares solves a lot of problems when not in good 3G coverage.

Whilst Android has linux components, there's actually not much real linux there. So I made a debian linux disk image and loopback-mounted it then chrooted into it on the DZ, and it became a useful command-line hackers tool. However, to use graphical interfaces you had to use a vnc server in debian, and then vnc viewer in android, so not that great. I did managed to fire up firefox, albeit slowly! This would have been far far easier on the n900 with its x11 display.

Once rooted, I could use openvpn on the DZ, but had to do some interesting stuff with linux routing tables, and I had to use the debian shell for that. This would have been relatively effortless on the n900.

There's a huge variety of apps for the DZ, but then there's a very large community, as well as Google's development team. I think if Nokia had put even 30% of the resources of Symbian team into Maemo, it would have been far far better.

Google as a back-end service provider makes Nokia seem very poor. With mail, calendaring, mapping, chat/IM, contacts, video sharing, picture sharing, document sharing etc they offer a comprehensive service. Whilst Nokia/Ovi have offered many of these services, sometimes shutting them down, they didn't seem to have a coherent strategy or sufficient overarching vision to join it all up. Nokia/OVI never really understood that a smartphone needs more than good hardware, it needs a proper suite of apps and a proper online service "cloud" behind it, all integrated nicely. I think Nokia understand it now, too late, and they are hoping that Microsoft will provide that.

So, the n900 wins in versatility, but the DZ wins as being more modern with better performance, better choice of apps, better online service.