3. 256mb/800 mhz is fine if software is written intelligently, which not all is.
Absolutely. Opera starts and loads and displays a file from disk in about 2-3 seconds. Firefox takes 30+ seconds to get to the stage where I can type in a URL.
WELL, because the hardware is getting kinda old and im dissapointed at nokia that they only got 1ghz on the n9.
I guess they done it for the money like all greedy corporations.
The only real alternative that I can think of is the Motorola Milestone 3 / Droid 3. I have been eyeing these up recently because I want a bit of Android to go with my N900 (not replace!).
Anybody got any opinions on the Droid 3 / Milestone 3?
My own reasoning for saying the N900's hardware is old is that it already was somewhat slow in the beginning. That is, it has roughly the same horsepower and memory as the iPhone 3GS, yet that software performed flawlessly and the N900's...well, didn't. (Of course, neither did Android's at that stage.) And while I haven't OC'd my N900, I've tried Swappolube and friends and got some better action, but after a while things always seem to slow down; also using anything that uses the GPS receiver seems to lock up the device in an hour or two, which seems directly caused by something in the D-Bus system.
New hardware wouldn't fix these, but they would make them less of a pain. Of course, if we had mostly free drivers, we could probably fix 99% of these problems, but that's Nokia's fault.
Also, my eyes are getting tired of squinting at the tiny text. I really would like one of those 7" screens, even if I couldn't carry it in my pocket any longer. That also helps watching video when you don't have a laptop around, like at the laundromat or a plane.
When I originally bought my N900, I thought I could use it like a handheld netbook, and while I can in some ways, the tiny screen, very tiny RAM (for a 2nd-decade-of-the-21st-century device), slow flash drives (very noticeable when swapping), and single-core processor running <1 GHz doesn't cut it for modern bloatware.
Yes, I said bloatware: truthfully, even an embedded Linux kernel is somewhat bloatware. Throw in apps fatter than I am like Firefox (this includes microB) and try to run in 256M and it just doesn't cut it these days.
Of course, these are just my opinions. If I had my way, I'd have a device with a Maemo-like system on it (or MeeGo or...) with an internal multi-flash SSD, the new super-fast SD standard coming out (or, perhaps better, CF since it's truly open), USB 3, 7" AMOLED resistive screen, and 4 cores running at least 1 GHz into 2GB or RAM! I doubt it will happen, but I can dream, right?
(Or, to put it bluntly, we're at the point we should stop considering smartphones embedded devices...)
