Nokia N900, a very short review
Short review, but pretty long testing as I’ve got my hands on the N900, final European version and tested it for a few days before I can write my final conclusion on it. I’ve presented the N900 on a longer post here, but time I’ll resume everything for better readability, because after all, you’re all interested to find out how it performed and if is worth buying it or not.
Impressions of the Nokia N900 and new Maemo platform
Design wise, the N900 is a pretty minimalistic “brick” with few hardware buttons to press and a lot of virtual ones to use. Unfortunately I miss hardware buttons for things like Answer and Hang up. The interface might seem completely screwed up for people who are used to Symbian S60, but in an hour or two you’ll be already acquainted with it as it’s pretty intuitive.
What you’ll find after a few hours of playing with it is there’s not a lot of software to mess with. The Maemo 5 OS is pretty new and you can’t find too much applications for it, and the ones you do find have few settings so probably they won’t do what they were supposed to. Maemo Ovi Store says “it’s coming” and Nokia PC Suite can only copy files on in. The new Ovi Suite can’t even see the N900.
Maemo is like an immature funny child
I wonder why Nokia launched the N900 without a few hundred applications and after making some cleaning in its own backyard (the PC suite support comes into my mind now). Thankfully the hardware construction is great, nothing to complain here: the sliding screen mechanism is great, keyboard is nice, even if it only has 3 rows.
The best part: web browser
This is maybe why you should buy the N900: it has a Mozilla based browser that shows even flash content and complex websites without a glitch (only the resolution is the real problem as you’ll never see on a mobile device desktop like pixels). I could even post from the WordPress admin interface with pictures uploads and such but only the low screen resolution (for a computer) kept me from trying again as you really have to be patient.
What’s not to like about the Nokia N900
Price: it’s now 800 $ on Amazon (Update: price just went down to 499$), without subsidy. Screen interface only works in landscape mode, so you’ll only use it with two hands, with the keyboard slide open. There’s no office documents suite editor (just a trial reader version) and that’s childish on a 800 $ device. There’s no multi touch, so not really a tablet PC and MID competitor. WiFi connections stay open till you shut them down or go out of range, so it’s worse than Symbian and affects battery life a lot.
And the biggest issue I have with the N900 is battery life, or the lack of it to be fair. Doing everything you would normally do on a Internet Tablet might get you from dusk till dawn, but I haven’t managed that. It’s ridiculous. Plus the body of the N900 is on the massive side, so why on earth Nokia didn’t put a larger battery it’s beyond my understanding.
Conclusion
I would wait for next year’s Nokia Maemo 6 high end device (N910 or whatever it will be called). It might solve the software problems of the N900 and I hope it will get cheaper, but there’s no telling if this will happen in 2010. I surely hope it does as the N900 is a pretty interesting device, which I wouldn’t mind getting as a present.
