NOKIA N900

Nokia is facing a tide of ferocious competitors in the lucrative high-end smartphone market, but the company is on the move: Nokia is battling on multiple fronts a the same time: OS, app store, maps and devices. With the N900, Nokia wanted to build a "handheld computer with phone functionalities". I suspect that for prospective users, if it looks like a phone, it should work like a phone.

Nokia has equipped the N900 with decent hardware: it has a 600Mhz processor (the same used in the Motorola Droid) that integrates a PowerVR SGX 530 graphics processor (OpenGL 2.0). Finally, the N900 runs Maemo, a Linux-based operating system that is backed by major players like Intel. Where does the Nokia N900 fit in the current smartphone landscape ?

The Nokia N900 design is clean. It has a full qwerty sliding keyboard, which is practical for typing comfortably. However, this also contributes to the thickness of the N900. The keyboard keys are small and densely packed. The sliding mechanism is solid and that's good because this device has been designed to use in landscape mode. Typing speed is on par with the Nokia N97: not optimum, but still better than a virtual keyboard. On the back, there is a 5 megapixel digital camera with dual-LED flash and a lens cover. There is a VGA front camera too.

On the top and bottom, there are two speakers. They are used in games, but also during calls in "speaker mode".

The WVGA (800x480) touch display is superb and it is surprisingly accurate (it uses resistive technology, so you can use your nails), it's practical to put the cursor wherever I want. Despite its resistive technology, it is very reactive and doesn't require a lot of pressure to operate. Unfortunately, it does not support multi-touch, which would have been nice.

Phone basics (Very good)

Searching and finding contacts to place a call is very easy with the Nokia N900. If you don't want to slide the keyboard out, Nokia has implemented a quick way to find contacts: you can quickly go through an alphabetically sorted list. Once a contact is found the N900 will propose to connect via a phone call, or via a VOIP service like Skype. It is possible to place a Skype-to-Skype or a Skype-to-phone (SkypeOut) call from the handset which is awesome to save money, especially when roaming is involved. Make sure that you are not using international data roaming to call though! It is possible to place Skype calls via WiFi and via a 3G network (I'm using T-Mobile's 3G network right now).

When not using the physical keyboard, there is a virtual keyboard that will appear whenever you are in an editable field. The virtual keyboard is large an comfortable because it takes most of the screen space. Thanks to its size, the error rate is lower, but the virtual keyboard works only in landscape mode. If you want, you can de-activate the virtual keyboard completely in the settings. Personally, I find it faster to slide the physical keyboard out when I need to type something.

Web Browsing (Excellent)

The Nokia N900 uses the Maemo web browser, which is built with technology from Mozilla, the foundation behind Firefox.

Flash support: The N900's Maemo Browser is the first mobile browser that I have tried that has Flash 9.4 support. Yes, it means that you can go to Vimeo, Hulu or Youtube (for desktops) and it works... but... video playback in a window is significantly slower than on a desktop machine, so although Flash support is there, the actual experience isn't (yet). There are good news: in full-screen mode, Youtube videos run fast enough to be enjoyable.

Email (Very good)

Out of the box, the Nokia N900 supports a large number of email services like .Mac, AIM, AOL, Hotmail, EarthLink, Yahoo and many more. If you use one of the available mail services, all you need is your account login information. If not, you will be asked for the mail server name, port and so on. It is possible to add several email accounts.

Creating and sending an email is done quickly and efficiently, but the Nokia N900 user interface has not been designed to be email centric: there's no homepage that tells you how many emails are waiting (and from who). Getting to the email application can require two or three taps, which is a lot if you check email frequently. Of course, that could simply be solved by an "email widget" (not available right now). Overall, it would be nice to have a faster access to email information.

Photos/video captures (Excellent/Very good)

Photos: The Nokia N900 is by far the best camera-phone. Out of the box, the color balance and contrast are closer to what they should be. The photo quality is very impressed.

Video: Video capture is done in 848x480 pixels (3.4Mbps, 22.3fps, AAC mono 48kHz), which is way higher than any Android phone that I know of, and superior (in resolution) to the iPhone 3GS, which records in 640x480 at 30fps. In good lighting conditions, the videos are really nice and detailed. In dim lighting, you will be able to see compression artifacts, but overall, the video recording is very good - I just wish that we had the option to trade off resolution for faster frame-rate.

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