I am thinking of replacing my trusted n800+e71 combo with the n900 but I have some questions maybe someone has answers to:

- Does the wireless driver in the n900 support packet injection ?
- are all the hardware components supported by drivers (unlike the accelerator inside n800)?
- How much of the n900 is supported by binary, closed source, drivers?
- How open is the access to the gsm radio?

thanks.

Well, I don't have answers to your questions, but so as not to add another thread to the mix, I'll add a few of my own questions.

1. Will the n900 work on the Sprint network?
2. Can it act as just a stand alone internet tablet, or does it need to be activated as a phone too in order to use it?

As for item's 3 and 4, I don't know the exact answer, but I can take a fair guess from previous experience. With #3, I'd say all would be open source AFAIK. As for #4, given the nazi like way the cellular companies protect their network and lock you in, I doubt you'll have any access short of unlocking the phone.

Hmm, I thougt about (your) nr. 2 and the answer is: it's linux, I bet you can turn on and off anything or even route the net from 3g to wifi and or bluetooth pan.

This is not going to be a phone liked by many operators...

Can N900 be used as usb modem 'out of the box'?

Parsing this as "{binary, closed} {source, drivers}":
For Diablo Nokia stated that about 80% is Open Source. For Fremantle I assume that it is a little bit higher as several components were either open sourced or replaced by open source code (but of course some new components have been added too, some of them closed source).
Also see http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages .

@icebox

- according to Peter@maemo there is FM receiver component in N900 not supported officially
- gsm component is still closed source (AFAIK in Maemo 6 it will be open)

@amoult

- according to Polish sklep.nokia.pl phone can be used as USB modem (contrary to Bluetooth which is not officially supported) so I think it should more or less work out of the box

1. No.
2. Stand alone works fine.

@vvaz thank you for the answer.
Of course if the n900 ever gets a Maemo 6 update is anybody's guess.

@Andre Klapper
Still if the 10% left are the gsm and sound drivers mer will have a hard time getting around...

Anyone knows, if there's a voice/call recording application in N900? I use my my S60 phone for making interviews and would like to use N900 for that purpose, too.

You already have Maemo recorder for regular sound recording, and as the call audio seems routed through good old pulseaudio, it should not be that hard to hack even if call recording is not supported out of the box.