[ubuntu-za] Nokia N900 or HTC Hero

[Johan Mynhardt]

On 14/01/2010 07:24, Morgan Collett wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 17:17, Andre Hugo<cortexhugo at mac.com>  wrote:
>> Hi List,
>>
>> Thinking of getting a new phone. I have narrow it down to Nokia N900 and
>> HTC Hero.
>>
>> As I am running Karmic at home and work. I would like to hear from the
>> community about their experience with these devices and ubuntu/Linux
>
> I have a Nokia N810 tablet - basically everything except the GSM
> radio. The user interface on the N900 has been improved, but basically
> it's a small ARM Linux box running a full screen window manager and
> the software is based on Debian. There's a toolchain to build debs for
> the armel architecture on the normal debian/ubuntu distros.
>
> I don't know anything about syncing the N900 - the N800/N810 did not
> include PIM functionality out of the box. There were some third party
> Contacts/Calendar apps but they must surely have extended the platform
> by now.
>
> Nokia's open source division behind Maemo were very proud of their
> involvement in the community - Nokia were a big sponser of GUADEC when
> I went a couple of years ago. Many of the software development houses
> in the GNOME community have done substantial work contracting for
> Nokia, building bits of Maemo - like Collabora building Telepathy
> which later got more exposure through OLPC and Empathy but was
> originally developed for Nokia.
>
> So... while I don't know much about the N900 specifically, it is
> likely to be a lot more hacker-friendly (in the good sense) than any
> other phone out there. When the iPhone came out, Nokia were
> positioning Maemo as the anti-iPhone, because their platform didn't
> need to be jailbroken - you could get root quite easily and build your
> own software on a Free Software platform. Browse around on maemo.org
> for more details on the Maemo platform.
>
> A colleague with the HTC Hero says its software is less mature than
> the iPhone - but it can be upgraded at some point to a newer Android.
> He also says the Hero is a bit underpowered - the Nexus One obviously
> runs newer more powerful hardware. All of these devices are basically
> obsolete within 3 months...
>
> HTH
> Morgan
>
I have run a comparison[0] on GSM arena between the SE Satio and the HTC 
Hero. One can't be chosen above the other based on the features, because 
where one lacks something, the other makes up in something different. 
The only thing is the OS, I don't know where to go with this because I 
really really really really want an Android... :'(

My upgrade is due the end of the month, but I might just hang on for a 
while.

Links:
0. http://is.gd/6ewgi
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