Comment by Fnoord

I had a N810 and a N900. Had a Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 before that, and an iRiver H340. The iRiver was fantastic, but heavy (due to HDD), single purpose, and offline. Also, 40 GB ended up being too little but back then it was _huge_. Nowadays, I use Airsonic Advanced [1] on my server with gigabit fiber. Client can be whatever, for example Android smartphone over 5G (won't saturate the gigabit fiber). Caching works well, as does it with other streaming services. I could also use Jellyfin on it. I self-host as much as I can, including agenda, but I cannot be angry at people who to Google, Apple, or Microsoft cloud because it Just Works (tm).

On N810, GPS was meh. The keyboard was OKish although I believe Psion Series 5 devices had the better (bigger keys). If you got small fingers (esp. young people) you may like the smaller keys more or are OK with it. Back then, websites weren't written yet for capacitive touchscreen (responsive started to after iPhone release). As a DAP, I find N-series Maemo lousy. Turns out physical buttons are great on the move. But the beauty of the these Maemo devices as well as Sharp Zaurus was that you could use them for so much. In theory... cause in practice, you did not have 24/7 internet (until N900 or if you tethered). Battery life was meh. Many websites worked badly. Storage was limited.

> The resistive touchscreen was amazing on the N900, and I have no earthly idea why people claim to prefer capacitive screens (my guess is a bunch of cheap Chinese products with cheap resistant screens.) They hate being able to point with precision without a special pointer, not having to wear special gloves or to take off your gloves in the cold, and a screen that doesn't shatter?

Resistive and capacitive each have their pros and cons. On N900, the gestures (like in Fennec) were innovative but still at infancy. N9 was better gesture-based, as is SailfishOS, though I never used either as daily driver. A resistive UI requires a pen, or large UI whereas a capacitive screen can be used at any time with finger (those 'special' gloves and pens are sold everywhere these days, and is only an issue when its cold). What was needed, for the mobile market to massively succeed, was a different UI than desktop: a user-friendly, capacitive UI with larger interface, and gestures.

[1] https://github.com/airsonic-advanced/airsonic-advanced