Next Nokia tablet better surpass those specs........seriously!

Not really -- swap is good even if you have plenty of RAM, because it allows more caching. Paging in the exact portion of a cached file that's needed is significantly faster than rooting through the filesystem to read it.
I do agree that it's a bit of a cheat the way they go on as though it had 1GB of RAM, but I'd want significant swap in any case.


I don't think it really remains to be seen, unless you've some reason to suspect the eMMC will wear out faster than the 1GB in the N810. People have been using swap on them ever since they came out, and I've heard of no problems. Actually, since the swap region is a smaller fraction of the 32GB than of the 1GB, it should last longer.

Over the expected lifespan of these devices its probably impossible to wear down the NAND, although does eMMC even have wear leveling? I was under the impression eMMC, MMC, SD, etc did not.[/quote]Yes, the MMC spec requires wear-leveling built-in. I've heard that some cheap cards disregard the spec and don't have wear leveling, but I've no clue the veracity of this rumor. (FWIW, I heard it in conjunction with couterfeit name-brand SDs.) I'm sure the eMMCs Nokia's using are genuine and conform to spec.

Wait a minute... Windows Mobile is not as slow as some people are making it out to be. On top of that, there are plenty of WM devices out there that had 32 to 64MB of RAM and multi-tasked just fine. I use to run streaming software in the background while browsing, leaving my email open, etc. with no problems on my 300MHz 64MB iPaq. I even installed a "beta" version of WM6.5 about five months ago (on a different device) just to test it out. It ran fine. Now, if it had hardware acceleration, it would have been even better.

I personally am tired of the look of WM and is why I love my N810. But that doesn't mean that it was bloatware like Vista. It did most everything that my NIT does and some things it doesn't such as infrared control. It also has thousands of more apps available for it with many of them being free.

And when it comes to swap files, I run my N810 without a swap file. I do run into the "out of memory" error once in a while but feel that it is a good trade off to swapping RAM around and incurring the slow downs. I turned off everything on my desktop just to keep memory and processor time to a minimum. But, this is something that you could do with the N900 as well.

The RAM is not part of the SoC and is not supplied by TI.Yes, you can mount it on top (to save space/cost) but you don't need to, there are designs using same OMAP with separate RAM chips. The parts (OMAP chip, RAM/NAND chip) are bought separately and are soldered in factory just like other components. For available parts see http://www.micron.com/products/mcps/

The biggest RAM Micron lists even today is 2gb=256MB. When N900 was designed there was possibly no other option. Today there is 512MB available too, see http://igep-platform.com/shop/index....products_id=23 but that option was not available few months ago.

As for the Qualcomm SoC, not sure about Snapdragon but previous chips (MSM7200A) say it has 288 RAM but only ~180MB is really available to Windows Mobile. And when device boots most of it is already used. My Touch Diamond2 has 183MB of program memory (RAM) and 111MB is already in use when no user application is running.

I guess they are cheating somehow and count also RAM reserved for radio module or something. I wonder how much of that HD2's 448MB RAM is really available as program memory and how much is free when system boots.

Personally I am glad that nokia went with the OMAP3 instead of the Snapdragon with the N900. Snapdragon might give you the magical "1Ghz" figure, which in reality will drain your battery like I don't know what.

In reality, reading the whitepapers, snapdragon is not bad, just a very different SOC then OMAP3 is. OMAP3 gets it's strength from it's DSP's and GPU, where the Snapdragon gets it with raw cpu from clock speeds.

Using DSP's has been proven that it's less flexible, but way more power efficient. So if they can make good use of that design, it should be a win there.

Also... the N900 might just not need it. If you can do everything with it you want and in terms of mobile devices, is pretty much the fastest out there, or fast enough to do what anyone can think of doing with it? The choice is right again.

Also keep in mind that we don't actually know if anyone is using the GPU with licensed drivers from Qualcomm, in the past there have been major issues with this. Power consumption comes into play again, it might be faster, but at what cost?

About the memory issue. I'm thinking 256MB with 768MB swap should be sufficient, we will probably see a bump in this with Maemo6. If developers are aware, it should work pretty smoothly. And just like any other computer platform, if you run a rendering of for instance 3D Max, expect it to take all cpu and mem, if you are using notepad, expect it to only take a fraction of that. Use it wisely.....

It's like with the Nokia N97 and Samsung Omnia i8910. The Omnia i8910 has faster hardware and more memory all around, but the N97 somehow seems faster and the better experience. Purely efficient use of what is there, instead of throwing raw power at it, without optimizations.

Take a look at some info for Snapdragon and OMAP3. The OMAP3 has been "hand designed" for a port and is a quite balanced chip in the end. Where the SnapDragon has made consessions to achieve the 1Ghz, in a way that is less usefull, to me at least.

As a last note. I think that including only 256MB is also done because of power constraints. Using more high-speed RAM, uses more power. Simple as that.

I have running 8 xterms, torrents, mysql server and postgresql, apache a mythbackend (recording tv), and am using 265MB physical. In this case it means +/- caches and buffers as they don't count. it uses as much as it is able to! 5xx it uses, some 25x is cache and the rest (1500MB) is used for page files and other kernel stuff and is free in the second I need it, at this state my system even swaps some MB. swapping on solid devices isnt as bad as it was 4 years ago...

I guess the questions you should be asking is that whether the N900 is limited by the amount of ram (+ the swap solution) it has, and the same goes for the CPU speed. Not to any absolute numbers, since the numbers are ultimately a bit meaningless. I think the answer there should be in the lines that the N900 hardware is much relative to the iPhone 3GS or the Palm Pre hardware, and therefore very much sufficient to provide a good user experience. You should realize that the HW solution is faster than "99%" (or whatever is the number, high anyway) of all similar sized devices out there. Power consumption is a major major issue with mobile devices. You don't just add megahertz without consequences.

Yes, better hardware will come along all the time, but that's not really the point. Devices are planned and created for the hardware that exists (to be available at the end of the design project) in the roadmaps at the time of the planning. One day the N900 hardware will be outdated, but that day hasn't come yet, and won't come for some time.

IIRC, intel has pretty much dropped processor classification by clock frequency, because they realised it had no meaning. They now use 'code-names' (like Q8500), and frequencies are pretty much disregarded.
Remember that a 100MHz cpu that does twice as many ops per cycle (double bandwidth) is just as good as a 200MHz processor, just with lower overhead => lower consumption
I have a feeling the snapdragon is not 'modified' for the better, and they need to compensate by increasing clock.
I agree that advertising 1GB of ram is wrong and that marketing people should be shot. In fact, who's to say you don't have 10GB (by extending swap partition) ? However, i don't think that's much of a problem. I have just 1GB in my desktop, and it successfully runs a full fedora system with all the apps i can use, hardly ever filling up memory. And while slower than RAM, NAND memory is nevertheless much better than a slowpoke HDD

Total Dealbreaker!

I'm with you! I'm cancelling my pre-order on this outdated piece of junk N900! I'll wait for something with at least a 2G Firedragon CPU, 4G RAM, 500G NAND and fuel cell battery!

If I live long enough...