Why not to buy an N900

First of all I have to say that I definitely do recommend the N900, especially for Linux-affine geeks. Actually I wrote this post mostly from my N900 while sitting in an underground. No matter what I write here, I still have to assert that it's the best phone I'v ever laid my hands on, by an order of magnitude.
Nevertheless, it does have a number of flaws that are more or less minor ones for me, but which may be major to other people who consider buying one. Therefore, I wrote this post so that people who buy it won't be disappointed after they bought it.

Software / in general

• A lot of features is missing from the start. Luckily, you can very easily resolve this by installing additional free software. For example, the built-in instant messenger initially doesn't support ICQ, or you can't change your call forwarding settings — you have to install additional plugins in order to do that.
  Note, however, that this is way less complicated than it may sound, since you get most of that software from a central repository, including future updates. Still, it costs time in the beginning.
• Also note that, in contrast to almost all other mobile phones including the cheapest ones, you cannot run any Java applications (MIDP, midlets, J2ME) on the N900! This holds less for "serious" applications, but most mobile games out there on the market are Java games...
  Meanwhile, you can install support for J2SE, and by installing a package from extras-devel, you will be able to run J2ME applications. Still, this involves a lot of tweaking and fiddling and using software which is not really suited for end users.

Phone and connectivity

• You can't have different ringtones for different callers or caller groups.
• Creating additional profiles apart from the built-in default and silent profiles (that's just two measly profiles!) is cumbersome and — of course! :( — requires to install yet another tweak application.
• It doesn't have voice dialling. If you want to use it in a car, be sure your handsfree itself has a voice-dialing facility built in (expensive ones nowadays do).
• It doesn't have MMS support, and the free software for sending MMS that is around now is fiddly to configure and far from being flawless. (Before you cry out loud now: Sometimes, MMS may indeed come quite handy as a replacement for SMS — since one MMS without any picture but with a long text is cheaper than a long text spread out over three or more chained SMS text messages.)
• No video telephony over 3G/UMTS networks. (But who uses that anyway, it's usually horribly expensive.)
• No video telephony over Skype.
• Video telephony over Google talk is quite flawed:
  • It's not possible to initiate a video call from the N900; the PC has to call the N900.
  • The picture received from the PC side is full of codec artefacts and thus actually completely useless; the picture sent from the N900 is alright but rather low-res.
• Using the European Eduroam academic WLAN (a lot of European universities offer this to their students and employees; a fact widely unknown as yet) is , in most cases, not possible at this time, although some people have reported success on this. Will be fixed in a future software release. difficult to configure, since in some cases (where your institution requires TTLS/PAP authentication) you have to download and install a hard-to-find unofficial software package from the Maemo forum.

Calendar and to-do list

A lot of homework to do here for Nokia!

• It's unintuitive to navigate from day's view back to weekly or monthly view.
• Even harder to switch from todo list or notes back to calendar.
• Categories (i.e., different calendars) for to-do entries, but no priorities!
• No dateless to-do entries, they always need a deadline.
• When you enter a date, it won't show you the day of week in the date chooser, so you have to count in your head ("today's the 12th, so the 22nd should be... errmm... a Monday?"). Moreover, you cannot enter dates or times via the hardware keyboard, which would be more convenient than picking them iPhone-like from a scrolling menu.
• The alarm prior to an event can only be chosen from a few options: a couple of minutes, half an hour, one and three hours, and a day. I'd prefer two hours, two days, etc. Or even better: completely free choice, as it was the case with the Symbian calendar on my old E70.
• When an alarm goes off, there is no easy way to select an arbitrary time and date for a second alarm (you have to display the appointment and then edit it), there's only the snooze button (i.e., fixed and small amount of time).
• No biweekly recurrences for appointments configurable, or other special occurences (e.g., 1st monday in month or things like that).
• You cannot add an exception to a repeating entry: If you modify one entry, it will modify all recurrences; if you delete one recurrence, it will delete all recurrences. Only solution: Let the recurrences end the day beforeyou need the exception, and create a new repeating entry on the first recurrence after your exception. This is, of course, worse than tedious, because:
• You cannot duplicate an existing entry, so if you want to copy an entry (e.g., if a meeting is twice a week), you will have to re-enter everything by hand. Aaaargh!
• Under some circumstances, the calendar returns to the current date, or the first date of a recurring event, when you don't expect it. This is confusing and annoying.
• What really bugs me here is that
  • the backend actually supports most of this, only the GUI doesn't,
  • yet Nokia are too lazy to implement it,
  • and apparently the source code for the calendar is not freely available (please correct me if I'm wrong here), so that the community can't do Nokia's homework, either! :-(
• No native SyncML support for synchronizing via a network! Helloooo!??
  (I haven't tried out the SyncEvolution application yet, though.)
• Only very limited syncing with Google calendar, from what I read on the Internet.
  The software 'erminig' allows to do that quite well... but again, you need to install it.
• The calendar desktop widget is not configurable. For example, I would wish that I could make it larger, and to have more to-do items listed, but no...
  Luckily, there now exists an unofficial alternative calendar widget which allows you to do that.

If you ever owned a Palm and have used Datebook3, 4 or 5, you know what really useful features a good day planner offers. Nokia's builtin calendar is leagues away from that master class. At least, it is possible to install the GPE calendar and GPE to-do list; however, that software does not access the built-in's calendar and todo lists but keeps its own — not good if you already have entered a lot of things into thoese.

Usability and hardware

• The resistive touchscreen is nice, but it doesn't have multitouch, is not as easy to operate as the iPhone's, and kinetic scrolling, although programmed in, definitely works better on the iPhone. On the other hand, you can also operate with a stylus if you wish; I operate with my fingers as well as the stylus, depending on the situation.
• When the device is connected either to a charger or to a PC (both via MicroUSB port on left hand side) or to a headphone (3.5mm jack on right hand side), it is difficult to hold in your hand and type. These two jacks should have been moved upwards.
• Although the device has a very nice orientation sensor (there are even two apps so that you can use it as a spirit level), only very few applications support rotating the device — most will always operate in landscape mode. (Luckily, the actual phone application does allow to be operated in both modes, so at least you can place and receive phone calls single-handedly.)
  At least there is a shortcut that you can try to force an application to operate in portrait mode, but it doesn't work with all applications, and you need to open the hardware keyboard in order to do that (but when you open the hardware keyboard, you probably want landscape mode, not portrait, aargh!).
• The graphical user interface is nice and easy to learn, yet I feel it's not the most intuitive one. Especially switching from an application to the built-in main menu vs. switching to the configurable desktop still confuses me. The window manager should support two or three buttons for changing the applications, instead of one.
• In general, usability is alright but could be improved. For example, why can't I click on an address in the phone book so that Nokia maps would open? Speaking of which, I feel that the maps application is usable but not the best in usability. But it has improved a lot.
• In order to exchange the SDHC card, you have to open the back lid and finger around with a very fiddly card holder. Moreover, the card should be exchanged when the device is powered off (although Linux nerds will know they can do umount if no process is accessing the card).
• When you connect the device to a PC in mass storage mode, it often sometimes will complain that it will not let the PC access the phone's flash memory but only the SDHC card. The purported reason is that access will be denied as long as any process on the N900 accesses the builtin memory (i.e., /home/user/MyDocs/); however, it even does this when lsof doesn't display any processes keeping handles on that part of the directory tree. Ehh?
• The built-in media player does not support Unicode/UTF8 ID3 tags; apparently, it only does ID3 in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). Hellooooo?!? We're in the year 2010, and Unicode is everywhere! What do I do now with my Bulgarian MP3 files with Cyrillic ID3 tags?

What's not true

The following widely circulated flaws have been fixed by Nokia in the meanwhile and thus do not hold any longer after a firmware/system update:

• The phone won't eat its battery for breakfast. Well, if you really need to use WLAN videotelephony, Bluetooth headset, 3G-only with bad coverage, and GPS simultaneously and incessantly, the battery will at most last half a day. But then, no phone would last long with such a treatment. However, if you install some powersaving helpers (e.g., kernel from extras-testing, WLAN disabler applet, 3G/GSM switcher applet, Bluetooth switcher applet) and leave the phone alone overnight with disabled WLAN, in GSM-only mode, without any instant messenger connections, e-mail or weather updates, then it will lose less than 5% of its battery charge during these 8 hours (measured with ''battery-eye'').

Geek aspects

• Although X11 forwarding over ssh does work, (a) the N900's applications will tell the window manager on your PC to have them rendered fullscreen (the address book looks funny in 1920*1080px) and (b) you won't see the application's menu, which renders X forwarding more or less unusable for most cases.
  
• You either have to program in C/C++ (yuck) or in Python (yuck). There is no JVM on the N900, neiter Java ME nor Java SE. You can install one from Debian, but that must run in a chrooted environment. :-( There is a Perl 5.8 on the device; however, many modules are missing, and more importantly, there are no [usable] Perl bindings for Qt or GTK-Hildon for the N900. :-/
• The file system layout is somewhat weird (e.g., / has only 256MB yet includes /usr), which makes porting software a bit more difficult than you'd think initially. Moreover, if you install software using apt-get install instead of the built-in application manager, then / will fill up quite quickly. So make sure you don't forget to run apt-get clean.

Specific issues with O2 Germany

As the following information only applies to German customers of O2, I will provide them in German.

• Das N900 zeigt leider nicht an, ob man sich gerade in der O2-Homezone aufhält oder nicht. Wem das wichtig ist, der muss also diesen nervigen Tonindikator für die Homezone einschalten.
• Auch nach mehreren Konfigurationsversuchen ist es mir nicht gelungen, über SyncEvolution via SyncML mit dem O2 Communication Center zu synchronisieren. Will man also Daten aus seinem alten Handy aufs neue übertragen, bleibt einem nichts anderes übrig, als dafür die Nokia PC-Suite zu verwenden.

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If I have missed important aspects, I'll add them later. It thus may be that this text will slightly change.
Last update> 2010-06-09.