Greetings folks,

I have been looking at a NIT over the last few years, I have yet to purchase one and since the debut of the n900 I am quite glad I did not purchase the n810 last year when my previous PDA nearly gave out.

I have a moderate amount of unix experience in both Solaris and RedHat/SuSe/Debian but primarily Windows in daily life. I have been very much out of the smartphone market for years and only use a very old Nokia candy bar cell phone, along with my very outdated and hardly useable Axim X3i.

Based on that, does anyone have any suggestions regarding the n900 that I can/should look at prior to purchasing one? I have some amazon gift cash and will most likely have more after the holidays so I plan to get an unlocked n900 but I want to get as familiar as possible with this NIT before I plunk down any money.

Desired use of this NIT would be as an mp3 player, phone, internet browsing, gmail, and txt. If the GPS is reliable enough I would love to use it vs. buying another device, though I usually know where I'm going most days.

I'd appreciate any advice, links, redirects to relevant threads (new to maemo.org as well) and the like.

Welcome.

A good place to start would be the wiki for the N900 it has some of the information you asked about.
Coming from a UNIX background like you do I think you would find the N900 a great fit, purely from a "Hey it has command line - what can i do from here" point of view.
As far as using the N900 as a GPS - its not really viable right now - Ovi maps which comes with the unit is - to put it mildly - a let down. That being said http://www.sygic.com/index.php/en/pr...mo-phones.html reveals that a third party is making a turn by turn app for the N900 and by all accounts this company does good work.

Everything else you mention should be easily covered by the N900, there are some issues with playlist generation etc for the media app - but with porting of mplayer and vlc I believe they will be non issues shortly

I am also in the market for a smarter phone. There are an assortment of threads here filled with raves and others filled with problems. The sense I get is that the phone features are not on the level of the competition. OTOH, the computing features have great potential due to the nature of the operating system although that potential has yet to be realized. Also, as a PDA, it's really marginal. I replaced may Palm with the N810 and I'm amazed at how poorly basic PDA functions are supported by either the installed software or the available open source apps.

If you like the idea of exploring the Linux capabilities, the N900 might be for you. If you can wait for Nokia to update the software and for the available apps to be expanded it might also be for you. If you need a phone today, I'd look into the Android phones before I jumped on the N900.

Overall I'm pretty impressed with what the phone should be able to do. I guess calling it a phone seems just as applicable as just a NIT.

I do plan to locate an unlocked version of the n900 so that I may set it up initially as a PDA replacement. Currently I have only used the old X3i to surf the web, get email, and play nester. I would imagine using gmail and the google calendar would suffice until more apps are coded.

As well, I wonder if this will be compatible with Maemo 6 if it actually does come out near the end of 2010.

Its less a phone, and more the latest device in a line of portable ARM computers, which have (almost) always been able to make voice calls over wifi but now has the ability to do voice and data over GSM.

In fact, the phone is treated as just another application with no real special significance. It works, does what I want it to do, and then goes away.

As I keep reading, it really does seem to be less and less of a 'smartphone' which I personally don't mind at all. Heck I'm using a Nokia 2115i to make very occasional phone calls, so the n900 seems like it would be a major improvement (though the LED flashlight on the 2115i is pretty cool).