I’ve had my new N900 for just over a month now, and it seems to be working very well. There are a few little annoyances though.

The N900 has a full web browser with most of the features you use on a desktop; it even has flash, so I can watch youtube without a phone-specific app. This is really useful, but a couple of sites spoil it slightly by detecting the user agent of the browser (MicroB, based on firefox) and redirecting it to a mobile version of their page. I’d rather use the standard version of these sites in most cases.

The main site that does this is GMail. It automatically redirects mobile phones to their mobile UI (which is here). There is a way to fix this without changing your user agent, just go to this page instead:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2

This takes you to the standard version of GMail no matter what your user agent is. However, if you’re not logged in it will take you back to the mobile login page, which takes you to the mobile site again when you log in. To fix this, use the following link – it takes you to a login page which redirects you to the standard GMail without checking the user agent.

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail&passive=true&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2F%3Fui%3D2

I hope this helps someone.

Thanks go to the people on the Maemo forums for finding this workaround (here’s the thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=55888)