Why to buy an N900

Alright, in my recent post, I described the numerous little flaws of the N900.
While the N900's set of features is huge and beyond description, in this post I will describe some of the really cool and (at the time of this posting) unique features that set the N900 apart from other mobile phones.

General aspects

• A lot of free software, and you'll get automatic updates for all of it without any further ado — that's just one of the many advantages of having a phone with a real Linux distribution.
• 30 Gigabytes of storage for your data (the remaining part of the flash memory is reserved for programs, operating system stuff, etc.), plus an SDHC slot (i.e., additionally up to 16 Gigabytes [1]; perhaps 32 GBytes or even more in the future [2] if the built-in card reader supports it)
• Finally: A phone with a dedicated switch just for locking and unlocking the keyboard — and its positioning makes it almost impossible that it gets pressed inadvertently.

One great address book

• The N900 automatically maps birthdays from its addressbook entries into the built-in calendar. Finally a phone which can do that — after all, implementing this feature shouldn't have been rocket science, but I don't know if any other phone is capable of that.
• Better yet: A program called 'Hermes' merges contact information and birthdays from your Facebook contacts into the N900's address book.
• Moreover, the address book features a very handy functionality: you can join multiple entries for a person into one with a mere click. Very easy, very quick; duplicate entries be gone.

Fully integrated, multi-multi-multi-protocol instant messenger

• To my knowledge, the N900 features the only instant messenger client — not just for mobile phones, but for computers in general! — that speaks virtually all IM protocols:
  • Skype
  • ICQ and AIM (AOL instant messenger)
  • Jabber/XMPP
  • Google Talk (basically the same as XMPP)
  • Nokia Ovi (XMPP as well, IIRC)
  • Facebook chat
  • ICQ
  • MSN messenger and MSN Haze
  • good old IRC
  • GroupWise
  • Gadu Gadu
  • Tencent QQ (OICQ)
  • SIP (which also can be used for instant messaging, although this feature is mostly unsupported by servers as well as clients)
  • Salut/Bonjour/Link-local XMPP
  • Sametime
  • Yahoo messenger
  (Note here that most other IM software also can speak most or all of these protocols with the exception of Skype; whereas Fring which is popular with Symbian phones and, btw., which is available for the N900 as well, does speak Skype but understands neither IRC nor (non-Google) Jabber/XMPP, nor Salut, nor most of other, less used IM protocols.)
  As usual, you have to install additional plugins to use most of these protocols; nevertheless, upon installation they will be tightly integrated into the phone's user interface, together with the other IM protocols, as well as GSM text messages (SMS). If you choose to have a mobile flatrate, a volume-based tariff, or if you're logged into a WLAN most of the time, then instant messaging can replace SMS almost entirely — in most countries, this will save a lot of money.
• The contact lists/buddy lists of your various instant messengers all are mapped into the address book, where you can join them with existing entries. For example, if some person X is in your ICQ buddy list, your Jabber buddy list, your Skype buddy list, in your Facebook friend list (and uses Facebook chat), has two e-mail addresses and seven different phone numbers, then you can unify all these different entries into one single entry for that person X. To my surprise, this didn't even mess up the buddy lists of my IM programs on my PCs (Pidgin and Empathy).

Geek aspects

Imagine you have a mobile phone on which you can install...

• a new firmware by logging in as root (which you can do without doing any unsupported, warranty-violating or otherwise unpleasant jailbreaking!) and typing apt-get dist-upgrade (alright, you might use the graphical program manager as well...)
• an OpenSSH client with X11 forwarding (Eclipse looks funny on the N900), scp data back and forth, build ssh port forwarding tunnels
• an OpenSSH server so you can log in to your mobile phone and use a large screen and a normal keyboard, scp data back and forth etc.
• vim and an emacs clone
• bash
• svn, git, mercurial
• wireshark, nmap, socat
• Bittorrent
• tor
• truecrypt
• latex (haven't tried it out yet)
• gcc (haven't tried it out yet)
• mplayer with kmplayer front-end
• a complete chrooted Debian that can run Firefox/Iceweasel (slow) or even OpenOffice (slo-o-o-o-w-w-!)

Other connectivity

• Can play audio and videos via UPnP (universal plug&play). I use that to play MP3s and OGGs that are stored on a USB drive that is connected to my FritzBox; unfortunately, the network is a bit too slow for video.
• Provided that you install some additional software modules, you can mount CIFS (Samba) and NFS file systems,
• do IPv6 (kernel from extras-testing needed for that).