Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

You may be sort of right, but for the wrong reason.

The "more details" you refer to is approximately the number of pixels at the edges of each character - i.e. the edge length, which is roughly the complexity of geometry calculations if the page was rendered as a big vector scene. The total increases with zooming out, not decreases, because although the characters need less detail, there are many more characters; the latter dominates. (O(n) vs. O(n^2) thing with scale).

But most renderers treat small characters differently, as prerendered greyscale bitmaps in a font cache, and draw them as little images. That's much faster than drawing the vector shape each time. Whereas most renderers draw large characters as vector shapes, because they'd take too much memory to cache as an image, and it's probably quicker to draw as a vector shape anyway - because you can take advantage of solid colour fills.

That could be enough to explain the different behaviour. But I'm not convinced. The amount of time it took to draw (quarter of a second or so) was vastly longer than the time it normally takes to draw that much area, whether as bitmaps, full colour images or vector shapes for large characters.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Although you won't be having much fun with flash on that machine ;)

That said, XP uses 2D hardware accelerated rendering paths only for the desktop, and on the n900, surely it can use the 3D hardware to get far smoother scrolling

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Yes, and eventually, with enough software updates (probably using Qt) maybe it will do that ;)

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Yeah, sorry, it was very confusing, but I was trying to contrast zooming techniques of Safari and the n900's window manager. I wasn't talking about the n900's browser.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

But what if you start piling on work for the CPU? Things start taking a while to respond right? I've had a few machines with processors around the 600MHz mark and even with a clean install of xp once a few programs were on the go it was noticebly sluggish. Perhaps not with the scrolling but definately in general performance. Actually i used to have a 366 celeron myself, and this thing certainly was not that responsive, ok again scrolling was ok but that was about it! the thing was ungodly slow even with a fresh install of xp.

Anyhow what i was really getting at is that yeah a 600MHz chip is reasonably fast for a phone but its not so fast that you can rape the hell out of it with having countless processes running at the same time and still expect the program you're working with to feel smooth and snappy. Just wont happen on a 600MHz chip.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Actually one more point on this. the 366 celeron in question is obviously x86. and x86 is a CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) whereas the ARM chips are RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer). This means that the x86 family has more at is disposal to get a task done, therefore will be quicker. Cant expect the same performance from a RISC architecture as in some cases it will have to execute more instructions to achieve the same computation an x86 chip could do with one instruction meaning more clock cycles get used therefore causing things to run slower.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

N900 also has a lot larger resolution to move around than what is on the iPhone. I think the scrolling is really nice in the browser for example, any jerkiness that may be there (I haven't really noticed) is really just cosmetic and movement is fast.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

RISC machines do the things they do very efficiently, and each instruction takes one clock cycle. CISC on the hand have instructions that take multiple clock cycles and because RISC intructions always take one clock cycle it is easier to do pipelining.

So it isn't quite as simple as you put it.

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Do you have a blog or anything about coding for Maemo?

I love tweaking code etc, but I'm just wondering, where do you start?

Re: N900 - Yes, it sucks.
 

Okay I have read through the first 21 pages of this thread and have come across a Playlist issue. I am going to ask something about the Playlist please don't eat me up if it has already been answered in the remaining pages and elsewhere on the site. After reading through 21 pages and starting to wonder if the phone I have been waiting for for 6 months is right I can be forgiven not reading further down or searching the site.

My issue is I want to use this as my mp3 player/phone. Now what is this I hear about Playlist issues! I don't intend to create Playlists on the phone. I already have my Playlists I have created using Winamp and Windows Media Player. If I drag and drop the whole of My Music folder from my PC on to the device won't it be able to see and play my Playlists? (I don't want to have to buy Zune HD and carry two separate devices and if I have to do that then there is more of a case to consider the HTC HD2 which I have ruled out due to lack of flash drive space for my music)