Pretty good article on this very topic from a few years back: http://josephshoer.com/blog/2009/12/thoughts-on-space-battles/

That said, it's all pretty much guesswork at this point.

I thought thunderbird3 was faster over all. Even if normal operations were a little more sluggish, the increased search speed would make me not mind.

I came here to post pretty much the same thing. When I bought my Nexus One, it was pretty much the top Android phone you could buy, so keeping it for 2 years was not out of the question. Judging by how well the G1 has held its value over the past 2 years (or longer, im not certain) I imagine the sale of my Nexus when I'm ready to upgrade will take a bit of the cost of whatever phone I do upgrade to later down the line. Combine that with what I save on my tmobile plan and it works out really well for me. Of course I also travel a lot, so an unlocked quad-band phone is a must. Oh, and it's also just a fantastic phone, so it worked out great for me all around.

I *just* ordered one of these from eBay yesterday. I needed a cheap unlocked phone, this option was cheaper than most name-brand used phones and at the price I paid, I won't be terribly upset if it's complete garbage.

Used it many years ago and recently installed 12.1 on my eeePc. Surprised to see nearly nothing had changed, but I think that's a good thing. I like the fact that I essentially get a base system that I can just take over and manage myself. It doesn't install a bunch of stuff I don't want, and installing new software from source is pretty simple. Maybe it's just me, but package managers always end up giving me issues with certain software (ruby comes to mind) and I end up having to build certain things from source anyhow.