Comments on: N900 vs Nexus One: a comparison

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:46:43 +0000

This is absolutely the most comprehensive and most accurate comparison of these two devices I have read. I actually did the same thing with my N900, though I stupidly brought my phone to the gym and dropped a weight on it. However, I am enjoying my Nexus though I do feel a lot less geeky (bad in my opinion). I only miss a few things: FM radio out (software issue) and hooking up the N900 to the TV to play Doom with my PS3 controller – that made my roommate’s jaw drop pretty quickly. Also Firefox was awesome though it’s slowly but surely making its way onto Android.

By: Sparky

Sparky — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:38:14 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve run a stock ROM. If you want to improve your Android experience, I’d recommend rooting your phone and installing a mod like Cyanogen ( http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ ). You get an improved launcher (desktop), included terminal app, busybox, OpenVPN (AFAICT), USB/Bluetooth tethering, and improved/additional settings in many applications. Unfortunately that doesn’t do anything for IM/SMS/VoIP integration and hardware failings (though you can always install something like Meebo).

Also, I can’t say much about the Nexus One, aside from that I was never impressed with it. I personally use a Motorola Droid (Verizon) and I’m quite happy with it, though if I were buying a new phone now I’d probably get a Motorola Droid X or a HTC Droid Incredible. There’s also the HTC Evo 4G on Sprint. Unfortunately good phones seem to be fairly slim pickings for T-Mobile, Boost Mobile, and AT&T.

By: Jess Sightler

Jess Sightler — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:20:02 +0000

I’m afraid that you have the Android multitasking system completely confused. There was a reason blog post that described things the way you have, but it was also completely wrong.

Actually, the Service/Activity split is not strictly necessary for multitasking (though it can provide other benefits, depending upon the nature of your application). Activities are sent a pause event on being put into the background, but the activity can still continue to operate (as well as run its own background threads). It will only be stopped if there is memory pressure.

By: Mardy

Mardy — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:21:50 +0000

Mappero adds 2 points to Maemo

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 03:23:14 +0000

@Tester: yes, it seems that Nokia are rewriting their own internal applications for the new platform, which is an investment choice that appears questionable OTOH, the platform for third-party development remains much the same in terms of the underlying components, excepting the significant change from Gtk+ to Qt UI.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but MeegoTouch and Orbit are higher-level components components designed to increase consistency between Nokia-developed components within Meego and Symbian respectively, right? They’re not necessary for third party developers, unless you are aiming to build something deeply integrated into the UI such as the UI-part of a home-screen widgets? Third-party developers can stick to Qt and get something that works on both platforms, and is presumably themed by each device to match the existing application set, to the extent possible.

I don’t think QML necessarily complicates any of this: it is primarily a new mechanism available to Qt developers to express the layout and behaviour of simple UI components. Surely Android and Apple could also add declarative UI mechanisms to their platforms (if they don’t already exist?)?

I hadn’t realised there were so many library-level differences between plain Meego and ‘Meego Harmattan’ – is there a page somewhere that clarifies these differences? One would hope that the ‘Qt Mobility’ APIs abstract the third-party developer away from these choices.

By: Tester

Tester — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:36:12 +0000

@Matt: They scrapped every single application from the Maemo5 platform. Every single one of them. Anything that is visible on the screen is being re-written from scratch with a different toolkit in a different language. Qt (as in QWidget) based apps look out of place on Maemo5 and they will look out of place on Meego Harmattan, since the widget set is MeegoTouch (née DirectUI). And Symbian has Orbit (which was also called DirectUI but is entirely unrelated to the other one), so you still have to write two separate UIs to not feel out of place. And these may all go away in the bright QML future (or maybe not), so don't get too attached. Compare that with the Android or the Apple developer APIs and then you can understand why there are thousands and thousands of apps for there platforms and a few hundreds for ours. This big diagram in that presentation is mostly about low level stuff that's not relevant to application developers. And Meego Harmattan is not really Meego, there are some major differences: rpm vs deb, ofono vs csd, connman vs icd, geoclue vs liblocation. So again applications will have to be repackaged and if they use any of those libraries, they'll have to be re-written. That's what I call a mess!

By: Altivero

Altivero — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:46:03 +0000

I felt the same way about the on screen camera button, until I realized I could use the trackball as a button. Now it’s so much easier to take pictures. The trackball does come in useful sometimes.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:32:31 +0000

I disagree with your presentation of the Nokia ‘Developer story’. Nokia did not ‘scrap most of the Maemo 5 platform’; consider the extent of change between the Maemo5 and Maemo6 architectures, as per http://www.slideshare.net/qgil/maemo-harmattan-qt-and-more (see slides 5 & 6).

‘They’re completely unable to get a straight story about developer APIs.’ Nokia’s developer API story is straight-forward: it is to use Qt for applications targetting either Symbian or Meego devices, and Java for S40 devices: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/

By: Henry Miller

Henry Miller — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:47:17 +0000

Thanks for this review. I have a G1 now, and am thinking about the next upgrade, but I don’t know which direction to go. My brother has a Nexus One, so I can look at that, but the n900 looks so much nicer as a geek…

By: Tester

Tester — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 15:24:43 +0000

@ray: The NDK API isn’t as complete as the Java one… so you have to rely on stuff that’s not API stable to do anything useful (like play sound!)

@bob: I haven’t tried froyo.. so I can’t comment on Flash there…

@Mike: The N900 ships with a copy of Skype. It not cheating like fring. It’s not Skype Lite. It’s the full Skype with all the features. Oops, I can’t count! (fixed)

@piorek: @lut4rp: They’re both pretty bad I find.. They don’t last very long when you actually use them a lot to browse the web. That said, the Nexus One has a bigger battery

@Patrick: I didn’t see anything about clients certs on Android, the signalling can be TLS on Maemo, but there is no crypto for the actual voice data (unless you use Skype). No idea about OpenVPN on Android.. Buts it’s 3rd party on Maemo too, so I didn’t count it.