Notices

i fully agree. The app looks more than promising. The only anoying thing is the performance. But if you need some time, that's not the problem. I'm not planning to replace my N900 the next time. If you need help with testing let me know(sorry i have no programming abilities to offer you further help).

@earthwings:
Sorry I deleted the config file before I thought about moving it to another location. I tried to replicate the problem by purging the extras-testing version and reinstalling the stable repository version but was unable to.

Also, I tried the mods that you suggested. Although it took me a while to figure out that {osmarender,hillshading} means do the same thing to the two items contained in the curly braces, I was able to get it to work. I have attached some screenshots.

A couple of Questions:
1. I installed the monav-router-daemon and downloaded the appropriate regional data, but it seems as though it can never find the address that I type in. For instance, the address 340 North Eureka Street, Redlands, CA 92373 (I don't live anywhere close to this location. It was just a test address). Am I doing something wrong? or should I be asking this question somewhere else?

2. Is it possible to modify the zoom in and out onscreen buttons such that it keeps zooming in or out as long as my finger stays on the button? It is a little tedious to continue tapping on the buttons only to zoom one level in or out.

@MiK546, Fellfrosch: We're getting the "movie" performance on the Desktop easily, but the N900 is slower of course. The problem is not a bad implementation, but the fact that Marble supports a quite generic rendering pipeline with several layers and different projections. It's much more than simply painting a few tiles.
Therefore it's unlikely that we get a huge performance boost over night. Still we'd like it to be faster of course and are working on that already. Patches are very welcome of course

@bugzy: Nice screenshots I'm thinking of making an own Osmarender theme with optional hillshading to be distributed via a future marble-maps package. The marble-maps package with additional map themes (but without osmarender) is already in extras-devel, I'll promote it to testing as well in a couple of days.

Sorry about the brackets; it is a shortcut that works in bash and gets correctly expanded there. I use it a lot to do things like convert /path/to/some/image.{png,jpg}

The search term should work if you shorten it to "340 North Eureka Street, Redlands". Anything should work where http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ returns a result, assuming you have an Internet connection available and Marble is not in offline mode. Maybe you can use the "Report a problem" button on that page to have nominatim support your query as well.
At the moment Marble does not support offline address search. I hope to have support for that in one of the next versions.

The volume buttons (hardware buttons on top of the N900) can be used for zooming in Marble. They support the repeated calls you're looking for, just hold them down.

@MiK546: I tried fullscreen mode, but it doesn't feel faster. Currently you cannot activate it from the GUI, though it's still possible to activate it in the config file. Edit /home/user/.config/kde.org/Marble Desktop Globe.conf and set fullScreen=true in the [MainWindow] section. Notice that there's currently no way to switch back to normal mode from the GUI.
Marble 1.1. will likely support switching from/to fullscreen via the GUI.

This is really kool. Just installed the 1.4 version and I am finding it very smooth and very helpful. Your work is much appreciated.