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.

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From hardware point of view the Nokia N900 is an up to date device, featuring all the bells and whistles a mobile gadget has in 2009, but what sets it apart is the Maemo, a Linux derived operating system that runs everything on the N900. Maemo is Nokia’s bet on the future of their high end smartphones. They’ll stick to Symbian for their entry-level and mainstream devices, but the cherry top gets Maemo, an OS that puts special care on multitasking, connectivity, integration and multimedia.

Nokia N900 can be alredy pre-ordered from Amazon

A conversation on Nokia N900

Nokia N900 main hardware specs

• ARM Cortex A8 superscalar CPU running at 600 MHz
• 1 GB applications memory (256 MB RAM + 768 virtual memory)
• 3D graphics accelerator chip with OpenGL ES 2.0 support
• 32 GB internal storage, expandable to up to 48 GB with an external microSD card
• 3.5 inch WVGA touchscreen display (resistive, with 800 x 480 pixels resolution)
• Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3.5G HSDPA (10 Mbps download/2MBps upload maximum), WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS
• 5 megapixel digital camera with Carl Zeiss lens, dual LED flash and 800 x 480 video recording
• Full screen browsing (Mozilla based browser) and Flash 9.4 support

Maemo 5 OS

As I said before, Maemo is the big change that makes the N900 a special device. It’s a Linux based OS that offers 4 virtual panels which can be easily accessed with a swipe of a finger. All 4 screens can be customized with widgets. The Dashboard is the place where you see what’s currently running on your device. You can focus on any running up from the dashboard.

The Mozilla based browser is said to function like a desktop browser so you’ll be able to visit the same websites with no difference whatsoever (well, minus lower the resolution). Contacts is one of the best applications on Maemo, as it integrates all of the contacting options for a friend in the same place. You just decide how you want to communicate with them. Search in contacts is very easy: slide open the keyboard and start typing the name of the person you’re looking for.

There’s also a possibility to share your status in various social networks like Ovi, Gtalk, Facebook, Twitter, all in one place. That’s a super powerful integration feature that I would love to use on Nokia N900. Images taken with the 5 megapixel camera can be tagged, edited, organized and shared online, so another plus here. The multimedia player is excelent, integrating music, video and Internet radio in one place. Everything can be of course synchronized with your computer.

Email support is great, like we are used to on a Nokia smartphone. There’s support for multiple mailboxes and Exchange servers. HTML email is ok couse on board. The Calendar application can be kept synchronized with your computer of work server, so we see unification once again. OVI maps come preinstalled on the Nokia N900 and benefit a lot from the high resolution screen

Video presentations of the Nokia N900

N900 presented during a show by a Nokia employee

Nokia N900 first impressions

Nokia N900 walkthrough

Nokia N900 photo gallery

Nokia N900 can be alredy pre-ordered from Amazon

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