Someone asked me to develop some Android apps ... and so I have an android "nexus s" here to play with. In general, I don't like it --- it's certainly not worth $499, but that's not what the subject says...

... it does, however, figure out it's GPS data fast. I know it (like the n900) does some interaction with cell towers to get an initial estimate --- but it also get's it's more accurate lock _much_ faster.

... it also seems to me that the android turns on it's GPS antenna fairly often and that a cron job on the n900 could be useful for this, too... because turning on the antenna often keeps it "warmed up" ...

In my experience, google's location server is much better. Try changing the server to supl.google.com on your N900 and see if you notice the difference.

I've used it too, supl.google.com is much faster than supl.nokia.com.
You can change the location server from Settings.

supl.nokia don't work anymore, i think everybodies use the google one now.

I use supl.nokia.com and get a lock fairly quickly (usually no more than 10 seconds).

If I recall correctly supl.google.com had problems with playing nice with something else. I no longer remember what it was, but I DO remember that it was relevant to something I used/needed, and that the people reporting the problem fixed it by changing their location server from supl.google.com to supl.nokia.com.