N900 Review Part 1 - Great potential but Maemo 5 still a work in progress
[thanks to WOMWORLD Nokia for the N900 review unit, the following is my usual stream of consciousness; conclusions later :-) !]
Things I like:
- Eye Candy - Great Effects
- Audio - Fun sound effects
- The truly open potential of Maemo since Maemo (now Meego) is a "normal Linux" not some half open / half proprietary b*stardized Linux like Android. This means out of the box I can install with minimal effort and do all the normal Linux things like install Ruby, python, use SSH etc
- Firefox ! Yes. Being able to write Firefox add-ons and HTML5 webapps is (eventually once the speed is improved and Firefox has some time to iterate and improve)) going to be very very good thing
- Camera while not as great as the N82 is much better than the iPhone
Things I don't like:
- Phone is an app and seems like a half baked app at that. Not sure how to invoke it.
- The media player app doesn't multi-task with the camera app. If I am playing music and switch to the camera app, the music stops
- Touch Screen is unresponsive
- UI performance seems to lag and the latency of the UI is often too slow. Seems very sluggish in other words
- No real twitter client, give me something like Gravity please
- No ShoZu - the built in sharing programs and PixelPipe are not my cup of tea; I prefer my multi-media to be uploaded automatically (or at least not 1 at a time; need to be able to select unlimited number of photos and videos and upload them)
- Maemo UI is non-intuitive but it has potential (to me Meego has more potential in the long run than Symbian!)
- Camera is sluggish when processing photos and is also slow to power up and auto-focus and to take a shot when compared to the N82