My day-to-day mobile phone still is the Nokia N900. Unfortunately the platform is dead for quite some time now and as a matter of fact there are next to no cool apps like there are for Google’s Android.

Hence the fundamental question: stick to Maemo 5 or leave for Android? I very much appreciate the openness of the N900 - admittedly there are some proprietary components). Want to jailbreak? Just use sudo. Besides I’m very much into Debian and since Maemo is kindof derived from it, you can just open up a xterm window and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade to do a full system upgrade. Want to overclock the phone? Well, just kernel-config lock 850 on the shell. And last but not least it has got a hardware keyboard which is very useful if you’re typing lots of stuff over the day …

At least there are Android phones with hardware keyboard like the HTC’s Desire Z or Sony’s Xperia mini pro. Compared to the 805 MHz of my overclocked N900 they both don’t have much more processing power. The Desire Z is clocked at 800 MHz (by default though). The Xperia runs at 1 GHz. However both have twice as much RAM – a detail of the N900 that really bugs me. It almost always uses more than 300 megs of swap space.

After all I decided for the openness. Having sudo, apt-get, openvpn, iptables etc.pp at hand is just plain cool and awesome. In order to have an even cooler phone I’ll tackle the missing 3pcc call support of the SIP stack soon. Hopefully with more luck than last time on it…