Nokia N900 Review | A Review of Nokia N900
N900 is the latest smart phone generation of the giant cellphone company, Nokia. First impressions aren’t auspicious with the N900. The open-source Maemo 5 OS is untested and unheralded and the handset is an uncharismatic, 18mm deep brick. Sure, it’s a solidly built brick, and the 3.5-inch screen slides back to reveal an excellent QWERTY keyboard, but with a screen that only works in landscape mode, it’s near impossible to operate one-handed and the whole thing exhudes a kind of meta-dullness not seen since the heyday of John Denver. Play with Nokia N900 a while, however, and a whole other picture becomes apparent.
The Linux-based Maemo 5 OS is intuitive, flexible, and makes Symbian look frankly awful. You can swipe through four home screens, each customisable with web pages, RSS feeds, live-updating applications, contacts and shortcuts to your address book, calendar etc. With a resolution of 800×480 the screen is fantastic (see “Killer features” on the following page) and the ARM Cortex-A8 processor, coupled with a generous 1GB RAM, means you can run multiple applications simultaneously. We gaily skipped between the music player, a YouTube vid, multiple web pages, the camera and various contacts and message folders without any of the sluggishness you get from other handsets. Cane the web and you’ll need to carry a charger around with you, though.
Instant Messages in N900 are displayed alongside SMS in the Conversations tab and it’s very simple to synch contact information across apps. Push mail is a cinch to set up too, but is kept separate. It would have been useful to have emails alongside tweets and Facebook updates - hopefully an app will fix it.
The rest of the spec impresses. The 32GB of internal storage and a microSD slot is plenty. Geotagged, five-meg pictures are fine, though with an LED instead of xenon flash, it’s no Satio. Ovi Maps is there for the habitually lost.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Nokia without some niggling issues and a faintly foolish marketing claim. The touchscreen doesn’t support multi-touch and the one on our early sample was unresponsive. There’s no support for MMS. Why? Because Nokia says the Nokia N900 is a “computing/internet solution” and not a phone. Err… it looks like a phone to us, chaps.
It’s also not obvious when you’ve missed a message. A light flashes and the menu glows, but there’s no indication what or who you’ve missed. However, with a customisable interface, superb multimedia features and capable browser, the N900 is better than any Nokia of recent vintage and superior to most smartphone rivals. Nokia can call it what it likes - as we said, it looks like a phone and quacks like a phone. Whatever it is, it rocks.
Killer Features of Nokia N900
1 Screen
Bright, colourful and sharp, the Nokia N900’s touchscreen is great for video and browsing alike. Flash 9.4 support lets you play back YouTube clips as nature intended, albeit with slight juddering and lag
2 Web browser
The Mozilla browser is excellent, swiftly displaying full web pages in just few seconds. You can scroll around with your finger or via a movable navigation arrow and zoom by tapping, or with the volume slider
3 Music player
Select albums, iPhone-like, by clicking through cover art. The supplied headphones are comfortable and sound better than average, but still feel cheap. As there’s a 3.5mm socket, they are easily replaced, however…
4 App stores
Apps will soon be available from Ovi Store for Maemo 5 when it launches, as well as developer portal Maemo Select, which already has 50 apps including FaceBook and Amazon. It’s open source so anyone can develop for it.
OPERATING SYSTEM Maemo 5.5
SCREEN 3.5 inches, 800×480
CONNECTIVITY 10Mbps HSDPA, Wi Fi (b/g), Bluetooth 2.1, US B, AV out, A-GPS. 3.5mm socket
CAMERA 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss Autofocus
VIDEO 800×480 plus a VGA webcam
STORAGE 32GB plus microSD up to 16GB
BATTERY 5 hours Talk (3G)
SIZE/WEIGHT 111×60x18mm/18Ig
Bottom Line
* Love
Speedy and powerful. Great interface. Excellent browser. Plenty of storage.
* Hate
Unresponsive touchscreen. Landscape only. Lacks apps thus far. Bulky and ugly as hell.
Source: T3.COM/360 January 2010
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Hey folks,
Just received an invitation from Forum.Nokia to be a part of the most anticipated N900smart phone launch this Saturday in Bangalore.
So thought of sharing the details with fellow developers to experience the much awaited launch first before anyone else does.
Also, we can bring along apps or widgets designed by us and show them off in the event. We can even win a N900 for free!
The Details of the event are below:
Email for confirmation: forumnokia@isourceopportunities.com
Or call at: 080 65590000
Date 19th June 2010
Venue: Nokia Concept Store, Church St. Bangalore.
Don’t miss it!!