Design

The N900 is best described as chunky. The phone won’t fit into a pocket on a pair of skinny jeans and tips the scale at 181g. It also doesn’t have the typical tell-tale signs of a phone since there are no Call and End keys. In fact, there are no physical buttons on the front. Littered around the sides are the mini-USB port, volume control, power nub, camera shutter, keylock slider, 3.5mm audio jack and a stylus slot.

The heft of the N900, however, delivers a very solid feel despite the plastic battery cover at the back. Like the earlier N810 Internet Tablet, the N900 has a QWERTY keyboard hidden under the generous 3.5-inch 800 x 480-pixel touchscreen. Sliding the phone open feels like there are two pieces of rough plastic gliding over each other–we wished the mechanism was a little smoother. However, we like the initial resistance which prevents accidental opening of the keyboard and the final snap into position.

The N900 has a resistive display. This means it requires a slight pressure to register a command and, of course, it’d work with a stylus. So instead of flicking (which works occasionally) on the display, you’d have to tap-and-hold-and-swipe across the panel. We didn’t encounter any crippling issues with the screen as it was very responsive and the software is finger-friendly, so there’s hardly any need to reach for the pointing device.

There’s not much space between the buttons on the three-row keyboard, but at least the keys are adequately sized. They have a non-slip texture and a slight bump each, which makes it easy to feel each key apart, contributing to a decent typing experience. The spacebar is placed off center toward the right. We didn’t have any issues with this, but if you use your left thumb out of habit to press the space bar, you may find this layout slightly inconvenient.

Features

Maemo 5
The N900 runs on the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system. Users who are familiar with the Linux operating system can probably identify with the interface of the N900, but Nokia users who are used to the Symbian S60 software may find themselves stumped by Maemo 5 initially.

The N900 is designed with the desktop experience in mind, so the device is used almost entirely in the landscape mode. Right now, only the dial pad, contact list (when accessed from the dial pad) and the gallery can be used in portrait mode. The onboard accelerometer also lets you rotate the phone to get to the dial pad (no smart dialing, though) automatically.

Think of the interface as a three-level menu system. The top layer consists of four home screens which you can customize with widgets, shortcuts, Web bookmarks and contacts. You can also download different themes, change the background and remove the panels if you don’t need that many home screens.

The second layer consists of two components. By default, it goes to the main menu, but if you have applications running in the background, it’ll bring up a window that shows all the active programs. From here, you can toggle between different apps or close them by tapping on the x indicator. The main menu has 15 icons and these are the ones which Nokia deems important enough to put it on the first page of the menu. The rest of the apps goes one level down in “More…”.

To quit any of the menus, simply tap on an empty area on the screen. It can be confusing and first-time users may wonder where to tap. And since there are no physical buttons, going back to the home screen requires a few taps, depending on how “deep” you are into the menus. There’s also no option to rearrange the applications, so you’re stuck with the default layout. As you install more programs, these are added to the bottom of the expanding list.

The limitations of the operating system don’t just end there. The N900 doesn’t support multimedia messaging (MMS) which, frankly, isn’t a big deal, but it’s annoying to know that it’s lacking the feature until a firmware upgrade fixes this. The device has a FM transmitter/receiver, but doesn’t support FM radio out-of-the-box. Fortunately, there’s a plugin which can be downloaded to enable that. The N900 supports Microsoft Exchange, but only the 2007 version and not 2003–an instant deal-breaker for us. To download content from our server, we had to connect the N900 to the PC via the mini-USB cable and synchronize with the PC Suite application.

Web browser
Now that we’ve got our grouses out of the way, let’s focus on where the N900 truly shines, its excellent Web browser. This is based on Mozilla technology, offering both AJAX and Adobe Flash Player 9.4 support. This means you can view Flash content including videos and games directly from the browser. It’s fast in rendering Web pages including content heavy sites. YouTube and Vimeo video-sharing sites also gave us pleasing results. They weren’t particular fast (this would depend on the speed of your data connection or Wi-Fi network) or offered the best quality clips, but we definitely could watch some videos while passing time or during short commutes. Playing Flash games (which are generally more resource intensive) on some of the sites that we tried was very laggy, so that’s a little disappointing.

Messaging
On the N900, SMS and instant messages are integrated in Conversations which displays them in a threaded format. It’ll also support Ovi by Nokia, Skype, Google Talk, Jabber and SIP. We had no problems with the interface layout although more IM programs would have been sweet. And like most current Nokia smartphones running on S60, the N900 handles email accounts with ease. Setting up Gmail on the device took only a few seconds, but we were soon disappointed to find that it doesn’t synchronize with other Google services such as Calendar, at least not without some manual configuration. Alternatively, you can use Mail for Exchange to work with Google Sync to synchronize Google Calendar and Contacts. For those who have Outlook (running on Exchange 2003) synced with their Google accounts, this is one workaround to get contacts and calendar entries to the device without connecting to the PC Suite.

Navigation
The N900 is currently preinstalled with a barebones version of Maps. This is in stark contrast to Ovi Maps which is now already in version 3.0 on Nokia S60 smartphones. There are no turn-by-turn features or 3D imagery. To be fair, Nokia said that the Maemo OS is still in its early stages and improvements are definitely on the cards.

Applications, Maemo Select and Ovi Store
Right now, there are about 47 applications available for Maemo 5. These can be downloaded from Maemo Select and subsequently on the Ovi Store. Nokia said the latter is expected to be available before the end of the year, so it could be anytime now. By the time the device reaches the hands of consumers next year in Asia Pacific, things should already be up and running. There are already a few applications which we found useful such as Skype for VoIP calls, Qik for live video streaming, MaStory for posting to blog sites, Mauku for Twitter and widgets like Conversations which displays incoming SMSes directly on the home screen, Facebook tickertape, news and weather updates.

Games
Gameplay was excellent for the few that we tried. Graphics were smooth and that’s probably due to the 3D graphics accelerator onboard and the display held up well. See our video of Bounce below.

Music/video player
The N900 can handle the standard array for music and video formats. You can play MP3, WMA, AAC, M4A and WAV audio. For video, MP4, AVI, WMV, MPEG-4, Xvid, 3GP, H.264 and H.263 are supported.

[Damian Koh]

The Nokia Internet Tablet series which debuted in 2005 has always been sidelined as a companion and an accessory for accessing the Internet on a large touchscreen handheld. It had a niche target audience and the devices never really hit big time. Things have evolved dramatically in the recent year with smartphones rapidly outfitted with large touch-sensitive displays, putting them in a head-on collision with the Tablets. The upcoming N900 addresses that issue with built-in cellular capabilities as well as pure processing power and a desktop-like experience in a pocket-friendly size, putting it back into the running. 

Unlike the earlier Internet Tablets, the N900 packs 3G and HSPA (10Mbps downlink, 2Mbps uplink) wireless radios, so obviously you can make and receive cellular calls with it. Under the hood is an ARM Cortex-A8 600MHz processor, up to 1GB of application memory and an OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics accelerator. The combined benefit delivers an ideal multitasking environment where several applications can run in the background at the same time without slowing down the device’s performance.

But what’s really different this time is the updated Linux-based Maemo 5 software that is supposed to bring a PC-like experience on a mobile device. You can access multiple “desktops” panels by swiping your finger across the 3.5-inch 800 x 480-pixel screen, while the accompanying dashboard lets you switch effortlessly between tasks and applications in the background. The Maemo browser, built with Mozilla technology, has full Adobe Flash 9.4 support and you can use the onscreen mouse pointer to copy-and-paste text, or apply a swirling motion gesture to zoom in and out of a Web page. The latter doesn’t seem to work as well compared with double tapping to achieve the same effect, as it seems to “jiggle” the page rather than to accurately zoom in.

Messaging on the N900 is also a deeply integrated function. SMSes are displayed in a threaded format so you can always follow up on past messages. The Messaging window also lets you view your IM chat history and check whether your contacts are available for chats. You can also view their status via the phonebook, and from there select a preferred mode such as Gtalk or Skype to contact someone. The buttons on the slide-out QWERTY appear fairly raised, so hopefully this will provide a good tactile experience even though the layout seems rather crammed. 

The N900 captures WVGA 16:9 videos and 5-megapixel images and you can tag (using the new tag cloud) and share content with your friends via Ovi Share, Facebook, Flickr, etc. According to the specifications, the Maemo 5 software currently doesn’t support MMS or the underlying WAP technology. For business users, Microsoft Exchange is also supported, so this means you get push-email and synchronization capabilities with Outlook calendars and contacts from the server to the N900. Maemo software as well as application updates can be done over-the-air, so you will not need to be connected to the PC to get software upgrades. 

At a glance, it’s clear the Maemo user interface is radically different from S60 which we have all become familiar with over the past few years. So how does the enhanced system fit into Nokia’s portfolio of devices? We suspect S60 will continue to form the backbone of the mobile operating system for Nokia smartphones for at least the next year. But moving forward, Maemo, which provides the flexibility of an open system, will gradually be pushed into the limelight. That’s not to say that S60 will wither away as it will still continue to be developed by members of the Symbian Foundation. What we may see is S60 being used in midrange handsets, with Maemo used to power higher-end devices. 

As to how the N900 and the recently launched Booklet 3G Netbook fit into Nokia’s portfolio of devices, a Nokia spokesperson said that the latter is an opportunity to bring a fresh perspective into the PC world.

The N900 is available for preorder in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. According to Nokia, the device will hit the markets from October at 500 euros before tax and subsidies.

[Damian Koh]