Hands on: Nokia N900 review

[Spiral]

Nokia's new device has been shown off at Nokia World 2009, but there's definitely a touch of schizophrenia about it.
Is it a smartphone with a desktop-like OS? Or is it a portable PC with telephony options too? Either way, it's a pretty darn good mobile phone, and that's the way we like to see it.


The early thing to note is the device itself, while chunky, is definitely an upgrade on those we've seen before, with the Maemo 5 OS bringing all manner of new and funky applications, graphics and functionality not seen before from Nokia on a mobile.




The chassis is pretty large and chunky to house the 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen and slide out keyboard, with a stand on the back to prop up the phone should you want to watch a movie on the high-res WVGA (800 x 480) screen.




It uses a microUSB port for charging, weirdly has the lock button at the top of the device, and brings with it a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics, with dual LED flash and a lens cover.






The first impressions of the new OS were very good indeed. Not only does the Nokia N900 have a decent touchscreen, with good accuracy, the UI also looks slick and works very well.




The first thing you're struck with is how much customisation is on offer here. It's like HTC's Sense UI in a way, with widgets rather than icons giving you the option to see what your friends are up to on Facebook at a glance.
But it's also so much more than that, being based on Linux it's easy to see how developers are going to be able to code newer and cooler applications and widgets on it all the time.



The Nokia N900 is based around multi-tasking, with a small button at the top of the screen taking you to a pane view where you can see all your open applications. If you want to get rid of them, you need to hit the small cross in the corner, which although fairly easy to do, is a long way from the simplicity of the Palm Pre, with the 'throwing cards' system.
However, the applications pane does update in real time, so if you're watching a YouTube video it will continue to display in the tiny window next to all the other applications.
But the cool thing about the Nokia N900 isn't just the applications, it's what's under the hood that counts. We're talking an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration under the bonnet, meaning multiple applications all running smoothly.
And that's noticeable in the device we had a good play with - everything seemed to spring around as you'd want it to. Although the haptic feedback still felt like someone was weakly blowing a puff of air at us, the overall impression of the new OS and UI was a good one.
The ARM processor allows you to have multiple browser windows open at once, and the N900 did well at displaying them all with minimal lag. The browser, built on Mozilla's desktop internet program apparently, is strong and, crucially, very fast over Wi-Fi. It will easily show full HTML.



It gives the feeling you're playing with a very powerful device indeed, and we're looking forward to really putting the N900 through its paces for a full review soon.
Nokia also has its own version of Apple's pinch and zoom technique for blowing up web pages - you use an interesting finger swirl to zoom in. It's a bit odd and doesn't always work (instead it just throws the web page around) but there's always the option to double tap instead.
The Maemo experience on the N900 is a lot better than that offered by Symbian, namely because it brings a greater amount of intuition to its use than the previous OS ever could. We're talking an 'alerts' panel which shows you things like Wi-Fi, GPS and battery life, all displayed in more detail.
There's now an 'X' in the corner of the windows to shut them down, rather than having to go through the palaver of pressing menu, scroll to exit and then go back to the homescreen each time.
It seems to be that the menu on the Nokia N900 is only accessible through the applications pane, which seems a bit weird as it adds another step for no reason, but we're either missing something or the idea is to customise the homescreen so well you never need the actual menu.
Messaging on the N900 is a decent experience as well, with the cramped keyboard not actually too bad for writing on in the end. Not only are messages arranged as conversations, but there's also a great amount of support in the box for IM, with Google Talk, Skype and Jabber all included.


Media on the Nokia N900 is also well catered for, with a cool graphical interface on top of the video player. Playback is superb and fast on the high resolution screen, and the stand is the right angle for watching your vids with minimal glare.


The music player seemed functional enough, although we had to whizz by it as we didn't have our earbuds to hand to see how good the output was. However, the large and expansive screen gave some large icons to hit when using the player, meaning it should be nice and easy to navigate, possibly even in the pocket.


But the cool thing about the N900 isn't what you can do on it necessarily, it's how you can do it. You don't need forward and back arrows, you simply touch an element off the screen to go back to the homescreen, which is much like a desktop experience.
We disagree with Nokia that this is more a mobile computer than a phone - it's a smartphone and a very good one at that. We're looking forward to seeing how well it performs in practice, but early indications show Nokia might have just brought out an OS to save its skin in the nick of time.

[Dragons99]

my friend have it
it's not bad

[hanoxsilli]

N900 is the first phone from Nokia which is based on Maemo Platform. Nokia has articulated their intents to use Maemo in high-end phones. Nokia N900 is in Touchscreen, full QWERTY slider phone and one of most talked about members of the N-Series recently.

[marcusgreatt]

The Nokia N900 is a powerful mobile web browser, plenty of storage, 5 megapixel camera and ultra-sharp display. It's too fast, multitasking very well, and has excellent sound quality. Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth and GPS are all on board. In really appreciate that this is very good mobile.

[smithsbravo]

Nokia N900 Maemo platform is based on the first call. Evident in the high end Nokia phones to use their common intention is Maemo. N900 touch-screen, full QWERTY slider phones and most recently to talk about N-series, one of the members.

[tonybosell]

Nokia N900 is a good looking smart phone that is running on Maemo 5 operating system and Texas Instruments OMAP3 microprocessor that increase its performance. It support excellent 3D graphics, 5-megapixel camera, 32 GB internal memory and we it also access micro SD card upto 16GB.