I got assigned to a new project at work and part of that will be writing software for the N900 so I now have one.
First impressions aren’t that good. The device does seem to do well as a “hacker’s phone” (heck, I broke the thing while running dpkg from the command line – you can uninstall the phone’s software doing that!) but even the Greenphone (which wasn’t a polished and released product) didn’t have some of the obvious and glaring problems that the N900 has.
The thing has an abysmal partition layout. Only 80M free space on the root filesystem and app packages are allowed to write there?! Oh, and apps in the -devel and -testing repos like to install into /usr.
There’s a front camera but no software to use it? The thing has Skype for crying out loud but can’t do video calls!
There’s no on-screen keyboard mode indicator. The virtual keyboard can be easier to use as a result of this (though it’s crap for fast entry because it doesn’t support multi-touch).
I’m sure I’ll post more about the N900 over time. Maybe it’ll grow on me.
