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ok the graphics looks great but whats with the glitching.

If it had a REAL D-Pad and a couple of buttons, that would be brilliant. Without those, meh.

Quite frankly, there are only certain games you can play with a touch screen and accelerometer. I would like to be able to play games that need a D-Pad and buttons on a tablet/phone/gaming portable.

NGage was ahead of its time and done right, the time is now. But there is too much focus on gaming on devices without sufficient buttons for all game types. Without tactile feedback the vast majority of games suck, even pinball games are tricky on the iPod Touch as its either too sensitive or misses a touch, and THAT has the best touch screen of any portable.

Alex Atkin UK,
I agree a Dpad and gaming buttons would've been nice, but to say only a certain games can be played with a touch screen is short sighted. Look at the number of great titles on the iPhone, which just got a great version of EA Sports Madden NFL.

Actually the GPU in the iPhone 3GS (SGX535 with 28 MPolys/s) is far superior to the one in the N900 (SGX530 with 14 MPolys/s).
So games optimized for the 3GS can/will look much better than games on the N900 (and the 3GS market share will most likely be bigger than the one of the N900 too).
So as I doubt that the N900 will have such a high market impact (*), there will not be many game studios developing specifically for Maemo.
On thing that might be possible is, that there will be some iPhone games that will be ported over to Maemo. Unfortunately only the GL core could be reused as the rest of the API is just too different.

Emulation will run great on the N900 and PSX and N64 emulators should run at full speed. Yet this is no genuine development but just ports of existing (OSS) emulators.

(*) I think the N900 in it terms WILL be a success but the target group is just much smaller in total.

If you're looking for portable gaming power I think you should look up openpandora.org - I want both, because I'm greedy.

christexaport,

I own an iPod Touch and I love it. But I find only a small percentage of the games both good and playable (control wise).

Most games that use the touch screen as a D-Pad or buttons are too unreliable. You end up with erroneously registered presses and missed ones, compared to a real button. Sure they might be playable for some people, but personally I cannot handle it. It saps all the fun out of the games when you screw up due to control issues.

The ones I play on my iPod: Solitaire, Monopoly and Bookworm. These are games where a touch screen is actually the best input method. Like I said above, even pinball is problematic as you miss shots you would otherwise have not missed. One reason I got the iPod was because it had ports of Pinball Dreams/Fantasies and they are well done. But no matter how much I try, I still miss shots I would never have missed on PC/Amiga/GBA versions of the games which shows the weakness of the control scheme and means I only play it occasionally whereas with reliable controls I would play it more.

I'm also more than a little disappointed the N900 GPU is weaker than the iPhone 3GS though as it should be MORE powerful to deal with the far higher resolution screen. The Xperia X1s biggest failing is using a GPU too underpowered for WVGA, though Windows Mobile lacking proper acceleration at the OS level makes matters worse. For that reason, I respect Maemo as these devices badly need an OS written from the ground up to be GPU accelerated to match the iPod/iPhone speed/user experience, which it looks like Maemo provides. But lets not forget, the hardware has to also be up to the challenge.

Apples does have some great games, unfortunately the touch control is not ideal for action games that requires quick reflex. Also the touch part on iphone forces users to cover a good portion of the screen which makes games more difficult to control depending on where the finger needs to be. iphone developers have realized this and put controls on the edge of the screen, but that takes away about 1/3 of the 3.5" screen to put in a decent on screen d-pad and buttons.

Gaming is at best with a D-Pad and real buttons for the most part, that why even the best selling portable nintendo ds include a d-pad and button on top of the touch screen. And there's 2 screens so when touching the screen it doesn't effect the visuals of the screen that's no touchable and is purely used to shor information. The nintendo ds is the ideal game device with touch interface.

iphone may have better internal gaming chips, but keep in mind that the screen resolution is only 480x320 while the n900 is double that at 800x480. The same game on the iphone will look much better on the N900 simple because it doubles the screen resolution. It's like iphone can display a PS1 game resolution while N900 is at PS2 gaming resolution.

No need to be disappointed about SGX530: 14M is ~500K @ 30fps. Lit + textured + shaded, perhaps, 20-30k @ 30 fps. Isn't it enough? More than enough even for 800 x 480. It's faster than gf2 mx and extremely more flexible with programmable pipeline. Don't forget about battery life - higher gpu freqs eat battery faster, and it's critical for a handheld: not enough critics about 3GS's 1-day life?