It isn't. But this is a thread people ask questions in and read when coming to alternatives to N900, and, adding to the fact that there is already a new thread on Lumia I didn't want to hijack, I just kept posting here.

I was meaning to get a blog or something going and link up there, but (I'll be honest) I wanted the thread to be on TMO. It has been a nice home to me and since the thread has hit #2 on Google I kept it alive as I could.

I know it isn't the best thread or the most organized, but it's way better than several posts that basically said "I updated my blog". Seemed a very douchy thing to do.

Thing is, it's not new. In fact, WP7 is over a year old, but it was restricted to 3 devices for the geeks. If you haven't something against calling someone with Windows geek. I certainly don't. I run wc -l as you do.

Back to the point, however, 7.0 was really beta. No landscape support kind of beta. Not a recommended purchase, by any standards. As proven by the fact that the Windows user in me owned a Linux device.

7.1 is not a beta product any more. Well, kinda. Not everything works, but it's not the kind of beta that forgets to ring. We'll call it "late beta". By that standard, N900 was late alpha. It DID forget to ring.

And yes, we all ranted about N900 being born dead. It wasn't, it just died very young. I can't say the same about N9. Well, you never know, I guess, maybe Nokia will decide to change policies and finally support one phone till the end of time. Realistically though, I don't expect much. IMO, the N900 design had more in it than the N9.

N900 has a LOT of potential. With new CPUs, the generous form factor, the pen and keyboard, it really did promise to be better if upgraded, and it was still dropped. Heck, I still have wet dreams about an N900 with dual cameras for stereo pics and HDMI over composite. And tilt screen like E7. N9 doesn't have the same sturdiness. It's just a slab. The next slab will also be slab-like, but with better hardware. Why keep the old slab? Let's face it, it has the personality of... of ... a slab. There is no higher insult.

There is little to no incentive to keep the old hardware. I'd be willing to bet that if an N9.1 ever came out, it would have a dual core, and a kernel for dual cores, which meant it would be way faster and with a lot less bugs (and new ones). So, this one would be used to hammer nails in. No upgrade, nothing to show off (there is no incredibly unique hardware inside). Old, unupgradeable, buggy (by next year's standards), run-of-the-mill device. The fate of 99.9% of devices out there, might I add. Nothing personal.

So, whatever slab you buy, it's dead. The best you can hope for is a head over everyone, so maybe it will be good enough for the next iteration. Which is something Lumia seems to have, the 40% extra CPU kick. Whether that's enough, we'll see.

I'm kind of running in circles here, so I'll sum it up. There is a small chance L800 will make the next generation of software and it will live for 2 years as a nice, fresh device (one with this one, another with the July release of Windows). There is a very, very small chance N9 will ever get an update, and even if it does, it's even smaller it will run the next software iteration at its potential.

Pretend I have neither. All right. (scene fades to black and then to me climbing on a chair, holding a rope, looking up at a beam).

Ha. But seriously. Both N9 and L800 are so far over S3 Anna it's not even funny. S3 is small and fast, but come on. 680 MHz versus 1400MHz? Adreno 205 versus BCM2727? 256M RAM multitasking versus 512 basically single? Overall experience has a zero at the end.

So. A genie offers me one device.

I assume this is a one time deal, so I'll consider:

Lumia:

* Will get async updates

* Will have fast-lined fixes for major problems.

* Will have major patches 3 months

* Will get major releases every 6 months

* At least for a year, all updates are guaranteed to run on this one.

* There is a decent chance the next iteration of OS will run on this device.

* More power. As Clarkson would say, powaaaaah.

* Different, but not douche different like a pink iPhone

* Software from a successful software company (something Nokia ain't)

* Market adds ~170 apps per day (Oct study). 40K beginning of December, approx 50K by end of this year, grows at between 200-400 apps a day. I can't even scan through them.

* Supports, encourages commercial software, meaning whatever I want, I get. With cash, though. Still, options.

* Alternatives to software. First one is expensive. The next 4 will drop below 1 EUR if they want to sell. The 5th one is free. Advantages to easy development.

* Will work just fine with my desktop OS. There is only one Windows, it's not a Debian phone clashing with my Fedora or whatever (I don't have a decent grasp of branches). Windows phone will be well known and supported by Windows. In fact, Windows 8 will be built with WP in mind.

* Promises from Microsoft that the unified Silverlight API will allow for cross-moving applications from browser Silverlight to phone Silverlight (right now WP Silverlight is a restricted-function subset of Silverlight). They also promise that in time the OSs will sync so it will be possible to pause my game on the phone and continue on the PC. Don't bet anything on it, though.

* Beauty of cloud. Yes, privacy, still, if my phone dies, I buy another slab. Nokia or whatever. Purchase, input account, beam me down Scotty. I now TRULY have the ability to flip Nokia off at any point in time. Though now that they don't write my software, my hate is dissipating.

* Access to my data while phone is in the shop. Again, cloud. Edit my contacts, chat online, mail, keep stuff safe. N9 doesn't even have full PC Suite support. IIRC, it has NO support, you are given a separate tool. Can this even end well?

* Nokia independence (this deserves its own little bullet)

* Office. Cringe if you will, Office is great. There's a reason MS sells its product for 500/1000 EUR on the same market as Open Office (0) and still make a handsome buck.

* Games, games everywhere. And not the text mode kind, either. Tower defense. Shooters. Thousands of trials. I'm never going to know what all the games look like. Something an N900 owner would say.

* The Microsoft juggernaut is now with me. I don't have to wait for some dude to type up a Picasa app for me, for free, begging him all the way for a patch (not a stab at developers here, it's just that they have better things to do. Like work for money). The mammoth already integrated it. I don't even type my password when opening IE to get to Facebook. The live login the phone has is good enough for Facebook. Since I got this device, I am yet to log on to Google, Facebook, Picasa, Gmail, or anything else. It's either integrated, aligned, or I don't have an account. YMMV.

N9 (I'll try to mirror some of the points from L800 so ti makes sense):

* No updates, no fastline updates, it's all monolythic. If the trend from N900 keeps (and it's worse than back then, team ain't as big), I'll just have to live with most bugs.

* There is zero guarantee the next iteration of OS will run on N9. Or that there is going to be one. In fact, it's fairly clear there won't.

* Not a lot of powaaah. In fact, iPhone is also at 1G, but a dual core if I'm not mistaken. Run of the mill, to be precise. Not underpowered, though.

* Different. Really different, more different than L800. That's a plus. Not obscure, though. They sell.

* Market isn't a market. It's a respository where, if lucky, some of the stuff that ran on N900 will be ported. What we never had on N900 was because it couldn't be ported easily. That still stands. Except now it's harder, because it's a capacitive screen. And no keyboard. So, no emulated Linux, since an emulated text box will not pop a virtual keyboard. The "market" is an OVI store that has the incredible b_lls to sell me images. IMAGES! You know, the kind that Google, Bing, Facebook, and a million others offer. Sell. Me. Images. There isn't a tag to slant this text enough. Oh, here's one. ____ __ ______! 100% italic. Ha.

* Doesn't really support or encourage commercial software. In fact, it is based on an OS that discourages it. On the good side, tons of free stuff. On the bad side, either it's free or it doesn't exist. This is not fun. Linux apps can be ported to Windows and distributed freely, but not the other way around. I have "ls", you don't have "dir". This matters when building an app base. No app base, no users. No sales. No developers. No apps, which means spiral. The bad kind if spiral. The one that looks like a drain. Last I checked, N900 had 5000 packages, ~1000 were "user" marked. That's with -devel. Compare to above. No -devel.

* Virtually no alternatives. Once apps are published that do something, very, very few are rewritten. It makes no sense, since it's already there and it's free. And open. Why rewrite? But if you hate it, tough. Brew your own.

* Will work like hell with my desktop. Not OS, desktop. No software. Mass storage, which means no exposed backup, which means that when you switch tech, it'll be dead. I still have a contacts.db from N900. Lot of good that did me switching to Symbian. YMMV. Heck, it might be nice in Linux to work with. I doubt it though.

* Zero promises from Nokia that it will ever cross-application with a desktop. They did say it, and they lied. The phone got a Harmattan Frankenstein, and the other devices got Meego, if ever. If it doesn't die, the notebook will get updated packages and your won't. Never will the versions sync up. As soon as Python upgrades, you're dead in the water. Or QT. Or the new kernel. In fact, go ahead and start rowing.

* No cloud sync. The only cloud you'll see is the gray one over your head when you have to install Berkely DB or whatever they used to keep the .db in N900 with. And realize it's not built for your desktop. And with no device, no export.

* Access to data while in shop is zero. If it dies suddenly, your last backup is your last snapshot. There is a decent chance your on-disk backup will be incompatible with any other model, as mine were with N900. N900 backups only work with N900. And that was with Nokia OVI suite working. No soup for you.

* Nokia dependence. Yes, it deserves its own bullet. No flipping off. Your data depends on them, software support depends on them. I may be subjective, but I really don't like them.

* No Office. No, AbbyWord or what was its name is not office.. And you can forget IceWeasel and OOo via emulator with that screen.

* Few games. May get emulator, but without D-PAD in hardware, it's all iffy to me.

* No juggernaut. All fights are uphill. If you're not a developer, you're reduced to waiting. You can pass the time with bash while the as***le next to you with a phone 1/10 of the price plays a 3D shooter. Or plays around with a Flash game. Or uses their navigation offline (did they fix that? Did N900/N9 ever get offline search? Offline map cache? Saved destinations? Favorites? Voice navi? All that stuff I never had?)

So that's a point to point comparison, starting from L800. Turn it around, and you get a few points back:

* No Microsoft. If you're allergic, this is great.

* No online contacts. If you're paranoid, this is good. Though you're less likely to get hacked though a secure link than anywhere else. Sturdy password. Remote wipe is a b*tch.

* Free stuff. Though you'd be surprised at the amount other platforms get for free.

* Useful stuff. Fewer fart apps, more interesting and useful apps. The downside is, always function over form. Also, if it's really neat chances are someone will do one for the bad guys as well. We have VNC, SSH, RDP. Come to the dark side. We have SSH.

* Emulators. Virtually nobody else has them. The cool part, you get to play emulated games nobody else has. The uncool part, they're probably old games. You're not exactly getting Skyrim in there.

* Standard interface. Icons, Nokia-like apps, the familiar. No tiles, just desktop. Though I like the tiles. And I'm starting to hate the icon-grid. I can never find anything in there.

* Folders for your apps. That's good. No search. That's bad. Lumia has jump to letter, but that's hardly the same as having folders.

* Telepathy. That's cool stuff. Though while I did review telepathy as the coolest thing ever, the MS threads are a decent contender. Telepathy doesn't eat SMSs. OTOH, Threads don't support like 15 million chat protocols.

So there you have it, some things are going on for N9, though, IMO, not enough. I like Telepathy, but I like my left arm more. And I'd chew that off to not have to run Nokia's brew. By property of transitivity, I'd rather be on L800 with ants all over it than have the N9 with $200 strapped to it.

Unlike most people, I have the ability to right now straight-swap L800 to N9. Well, not right now, it's 5 AM here. But today. I'm not going to.

And just in case I was too clear I like the Lumia way more, here's a wrench in the cogs: All 3 people I know that own an N9 say they are happy with it. So there's that. It's not like it's a wreck.

And if you were leaning towards N9, I hope you don't like butter-smooth, 'cause here's a clue:

N9: SGX 530 GPU. 2005. 1.6 GFlops
L800: Adreno 205 GPU. 2010. ~3.2 GFlops

Adreno 205 also sports:
* Hardware-accelerated SVG
* Hardware-accelerated Flash
* OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenVG 1.1, EGL 1.3, Direct3D Mobile, SVGT 1.2, Direct Draw and GDI.
* Streaming textures that can combine video, camera, SVG and other image surfaces with 3D graphics

So, one has built-in Microsoft support, on a Microsoft OS, was built when WP was out (to developers) and launched, bench-presses twice the weight while the other is wimpier and knows little of Nokia. In fact, in 2005, Nokia was launching E71. Also, Nokia-written drivers. Versus the DirectX standard MS has established and respected since 1995.

If it sounds familiar, it should. The SGX 530 is the GPU that pushes N900. Except N9 has a bigger screen and works in 24 bit.

Yeah.