Back in June, I wrote a blog post about turning fifty and the new iPhone. My wife had been asking what I thought of the new iPhone and if it was time for me to upgrade from my old Motorola Razr. From an end user perspective everyone tells me that the iPhone is great. However, I look at things from a different perspective. I’m a geek, an innovator, an early adopter. Great user interfaces just get in my way. Give me a command prompt. More importantly, give me a command prompt to a real operating system that I can go in and tweak to my heart’s content.

I realize that a jailbroken iPhone might give me most of what I’m looking for, but I’d rather work with a device that allows me full access without jailbreaking it. I’d rather work on a device that makes as much of the development and distribution of applications as open as possible.

The iPhone is horrible that way. Skype was disabled. Sling was disabled. Video streaming was disabled. Tethering was disabled. It would take a lot of work to make the iPhone do what I wanted.

I figured that the phone I really want is the next generation Android phone. The Android development environment sounds much more to my liking than the iPhone development environment. On the other hand, all my video blogging friends rave about their Nokia N97s with great video streaming. The one downside is the Symbian operating system, oh, and also the price.

Well the other day, I read the latest news about the Nokia N900 . It sounds pretty much like a beefed up N97 with maemo, a Linux based operating system. I could hack to my heart’s content. Amazon is selling a U.S. version that is unlocked, so I would not be tied to a carrier.

Looking more closely, it comes with a 5 megapixel camera/camcorder, beating out iPhone’s 3 megapixel camera. It comes with Skype and Qik preloaded. It supports QRCodes and tethering. It sure sounds like a nice phone for me. On top of this, with Amazon’s discount and Nokia’s rebates, the price is below $500. That is still expensive for a cellphone, but for a full powered mobile device, it looks like it is worth it.

The one downside is that it does not support AT&T 3G, so it might be slower for some data.

As to Android, there are plenty of blog posts out there talking about Android versus Maemo. However, since Maemo appears to be a pretty full featured Linux, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could run an Android emulator on an N900. I have tried an Android Emulator on my old IBM R51 running Ubuntu, and that just hasn’t worked well for me yet. It may be that my R51 just doesn’t have enough horsepower and an N900 might not either.

One final thought: I don’t focus much on advertising on my website, other than blog advertising for other sites with EntreCard, Adgitize and CMF Ads. However, as we approach Black Friday and CyberMonday, I may add a few additional ads for Amazon products. So, if you’re doing holiday shopping online, click on my ads here or the ads on other blogs to help support bloggers through the holidays.