I'm currently (Feb 2010) trying out the Nokia N900 smartphone. FWIW, the runner up was the Palm Pre (Plus, probably). I went with the N900 because it's even more open/geeky, I'm less worried about Nokia folding than than Palm (Nokia is freaking huge) and it supports T-Mobile's 3G network, which is far and away the fastest in the US right now.
The big problem with the N900 right now is that it's basically a beta/dev platform. This isn't obvious from Nokia's site, slightly dishonestly IMO, but it sure is from the amazon reviews of the N900, for example. They're expecting "the community" to fill in a lot of the gaps.
In general, I'm fine with that, but I'm not here to take on a project, I'm here to use a tool. So it's important that I track the stuff that really drives me nuts, to keep me honest: too much annoying stuff and I should try a Pre instead. Hence this page.
- the browser keeps crashing -_- I lost a couple of versions of this page that way.
- I have a suspicion that this only happens when I install things like plugins without rebooting, but that's still broken because if I need to reboot, you should tell me to reboot
- there's a firefox for this thing, but it has its own problems (like popping to the top of the page most times I hit enter, which on a screen this small is very annoying)
- the big failing for me with basically every smartphone that isnMt the iphone (the iphone is a total fail for me, I need a physical keyboard) is ebook support. The iphone has kindle and stanza, and as far as I can tell the books that are exclusive to those platforms can't be gotten anywhere else. You can get Kindle books on the PC and then (probably illegally) strip the DRM, but I have no idea how to get Stanza-for-iphone books on anything but the iphone.
- neither browser seems to do much autocompletion (that is, they don't seem to store anything for most form fields, but the do store some search stuff and URLs)
- paswword saving issues: the builtin browser has a habit of popping up the password saving dialog without any actual buttons, which is not helpful
screen sound
text copy
;){kind=link}