1. Angry Birds
2. Conversations
3. Phonebook
4. Conky
5. cpufreqUI
6. Batterygraph
7. Contacts

These stay open. Camera, Mediaplayer, documents/sheets to go, e-mail, two or three browsers rotate in and out of being open based on how I'm using the device. Sometimes I'll use Maps. Would use it more if it were a direct port of Maps 3.x with voice navigation.

What would improve this?

1. Larger physical RAM
2. Higher resolution display
3. Faster processor or multi-core processor

I sometimes have an open xterm in background, running ssh with port-forwarding. Useful for mail access to a machine on an otherwise inaccessible network. I'll also regularly fire up a window to maintain one of my Linux boxen elsewhere or to run mplayer from the command line.

Rarely have more than three windows on the dashboard - performance begins to suffer. I almost always have modest running, and frequently the browser. SMS, maps, media player, camera, and xterms on an as-needed basis. Oh, and telephone dial pad too. (It *is* a phone, right? )

If you care, calendar and weather widgets sit prominently on the desktop, along with small buttons for favored apps. I don't make much use of multiple desktops, and end up hunting for things in the app directory. My lazy nature getting the best of me, I suppose.

two MAJOR things nokia should work on is making devices with better battery and not abandoning phones like the n900 like come on the ovi store is still in beta for goodness sake

I saw the title and thought... oh no here we go... another uneducated question... but no.. Nokia's actually being social for a change!

I normally run anything between 3 - 6 apps at a time but close them when done.

Please, keep on topic here.

Typically I don't have any desktop apps running. I try to keep the tasks to a minimum. But that quickly changes when I need it for let's say write a quick blog post:

- Xterm (to connect to the internet, install apps)
- MaStory
- Evernote
- Photos (for sharing, adding to blog)
- witter (to tweet about the post )
- Browser
- Email

I imagine i would have a lot more apps open and running if i could download any of use from the ovi store..... for the N900 this must hold the record for the poorest app site ever.....

Generally I have a few web browser windows including twitter, e-mails and conversations open at the same time and maybe a game...

Before rush hours, downloading some podcasts and checking agenda and or weather sites.

During development and testing, running my app and running monitoring tools via ssh.

I generally have around 3-6 windows open when using it and 0 when I'm not unless I plan to return to it later. General open are,

Mail
Browser
IM
Etc,

However to me its much more important that I am actually in control of how much I run of don't run. Thats what I like about the Maemo 5, I've used Android a bit and played with iOS however I don't really feel in control of whats running and what has priority, or what I can actually close myself.

At times I find it strange that after years of using Desktop/Laptop computers that people expect a completely fluid system without some kind of self (not system) regulation of the number of applications that they run concurrently.

I would hate to see a system management approach applied to future Nokia phones, closing applications or shunting them to some quiet corner for me.

I read the question as "How do you use multitasking in N900 in ways you couldn't with an iOS, Android, winmo, etc device"

As far as I understand the big deal about Maemo is that it really keeps everything running, whereas another approach is to just put applications to sleep and wake them up when they regain focus, and have daemons for things like music, sms, etc.

Every now and again I have to write an urgent email or an sms from my phone that requires me to reference a web browser, evince, conboy, often maps/gps, contacts, Mstardict, etc. I get +9 applications up and running then easily -- but since only one is really in focus at a time and the rest don't do anything in the background, I guess its not really hardcore multitasking.

The few times when I really want to have multiple active processes running -- browse the web while installing an application or downloading podcasts from Gpodder or doodle in MyPaint while pretending to listen to my mother talk via Skype -- the system usually grinds to a painstaking halt, becoming unresponsive, crashing etc.

I don't know if this is the fault of poor applications (heck, conversations and the phone app crash often even when single tasking) or the system load, but I'd say true multitasking on the n900 is still rather limited.