Nokia N900 vs. Motorola Droid (2)

Here are some comparison between Nokia N900 with Motorola Droid on ifanr:

  • Nokia N900 has built-in support of multiple email services including Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and etc. Android only supports Gmail and POP/IMAP email services. N900 is the winner in this topic.
  • Haven’t found how to sync the phone numbers in Gmail contacts on N900, while email addresses and GTalk buddies list could be synced;
  • Haven’t successed to use GPS/Map feature on N900 and there was a crash without a clear cause. Motorola Droid is the winner in this topic as the Google navigation system in Android 2.0 is very powerful.
  • Though it was said that N900 supports various formats and codecs including AVI, MPG and etc, there was no success to play several testing videos.
  • After downloading many software, there was an error message reporting “disk full” as the temporary download fold only could be cleaned by restart. This design of N900 is quite stupid.
  • Maemo already has emulators of GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, NES.
  • The resistive touch screen of N900 is less sensitive than the capacitive one of Droid, though the stylus could help a little bit.
  • The 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss certificated lens of N900 works better than Droid.

Maemo 5 is a powerful mobile computing platform, but comparing with iPhone and Android, it is not optimized enough as smartphone OS.

iPhone currently has the best smartphone OS so far. It is even more powerful than Maemo 5 after jail break. The SDK of iPhone has more capacity (direct access to hardware with native C programming) than the SDK of Android (the NDK may improve the app development on Android).

Some additional comments:

  • the weight of Droid is about 6 ounce while N900 is about 6.4 ounce, but the thickness of N900 is almost the double of Droid.
  • N900 has a front camera that can be used for video call and other applications.
  • The battery life of N900 is about 6 hours with heavy usage. The battery is 1320 mAh, which is the same as Droid.
  • The screen of Droid is more clear than N900 and the quality of Droid also seems to be better.
  • The SDK of Android is more easy to use for developing than Maemo, if the speed of the app is not so crucial.