A great "preview" of the forthcoming Nokia n900 has been posted at my-symbian.com. I say preview with quotes because after you finally get to the bottom of the page you'll reallize there's 3 more!

I've been using a Nokia n800 for several years as many of you know. I've really liked it but have had reservations with recommending it to others. First, if you use only Nokia software it's a stable device but with the plethora of Linux apps out there who would do that? I sure didn't but in order to have room for everything I wanted to run I had to move the OS to the flash card so I'd have more room. After installing about 200 really unstable apps I finally got my list down to about 30 things I use and even then those things aren't completely stable. So my complaints about the n800 was size, maturity of the apps, worthless hardware buttons, size, bad connectivity (with wifi only) and size. You'll notice that I'm a bit unhappy with the size. This is why I'm posting this photo and a link to my-symbian.com's review of the Nokia n900. How it stacks up to the Nokia n800 and iphone 3GS. -

It has 2x the CPU power (the same as the iphone and Pre), 2x the DSP power, 3d video acceleration chip (the same as the iphone), 32 GB of ram expandable to 48GB, a 5.1 MP camera that can record 400x480 video, hardware keyboard (take that iphone), sim card slot, removable battery (ouch iphone), full flash support and copy and paste. The last two were below the belt. For physical size -

Summary:

First, if you use From a specs standpoint the n900 meets or beats the iphone 3GS in every category but we've seen this before. The beauty of the Apple device is how well it works. It's a very solid device that just works. The issues have always been a draconian apps store policy, no copy/paste, poor camers, no flash support and a few other choices that Apples made that makes no sense. In the Apple world everything they say goes.

The disadvantage to the Maemo devices has been the immaturity of the software and not enough control over their apps. Ironically that's exactly the opposite of Apples main issues. Maemo has always been Nokia's red headed step child of an OS but it looks like they've swung the other direction and even though they're not admitting it they may have just put Linux as their #1 and Symbian as #2. I will predict (and you heard it here first) that Symbian will be phased out. Nokia isn't dumb (like Palm) and doesn't want to lose it's 50% of the Smartphone market because of an aging OS. Nokia's purchase of QT also means that the next version of Maemo will be moved to QT and the GTK (Hildon) will most likely be dropped.