On 3G coverage and quality

Today I rode the bus home from work with my N900 for the first time ever. I listened to music the entire trip and surfed the web. I also engaged in a Skype-chat session with a buddy.

The positive thing was that I staid on the 3G network during the entire trip. There were certain places during the trip, when my Hero would always jump back to 2G or lose connectivity altogether. Not the N900 - it plowed through like a champ in all the difficult places and never missed a beat. I could cautiously come to the conclusion that the N900 has a much better 3G implementation than the Hero (or the iPhone). Let's see how it goes.

The negative thing during my trip was that my dashboard started stuttering. I received notification of a mail and went to the dashboard. Suddenly, I could no longer choose any of the windows in the dashboard view. The N900 froze completely. I could click an empty area to go back to the desktop, but the dashboard was dead.

A minute later, it came back to life and worked normally again. I have no idea what made it freeze, but I know I wasn't deliberately running any resource hogging apps (with the possible exception of the media player). This would've been fine(ish) otherwise, but the same thing happened again a moment later on. 1 minute freeze and then everything was ok again. I didn't want to reboot, since a good song was blaring in my ears.

I have a funny story that's slightly relevant to this case too: During the day, the dashboard acted up as well. No matter how many times I pressed the dashboard button, the N900 threw me straight to the application list. I was getting furious: Isn't anything working right on this phone? ... Until I realized I couldn't access the dashboard, since I had no programs running! ;)