Nokia n900 Promo

Nokia N900 review

Today, Nokia stands at a fascinating fork in the road. Let's consider the facts: first, and most unavoidably, the company is the largest manufacturer of cellphones in the world by a truly sobering margin. At every end of the spectrum, in every market segment, Nokia is successfully pushing phones -- from the highest of the high-end (see Vertu) to the lowest of the low (the ubiquitous 1100 series, which as far as we can tell, remains the best selling phone in history). The kind of stark dominance Nokia has built over its competition certainly isn't toppled overnight, but what might be the company's biggest asset has turned out to be its biggest problem, too: S60. In the past eight years, Nokia's bread-and-butter smartphone platform has gone from a pioneer, to a staple, to an industry senior citizen while upstarts like Google and Apple (along with a born-again Palm) have come from practically zero to hijack much of the vast mindshare Espoo once enjoyed.

Of course, mindshare doesn't pay the bills, but in a business dominated by fickle consumerism perhaps more than any other, mindshare foreshadows market share -- it's a leading indicator. Put simply, there are too many bright minds with brilliant ideas trying to get a piece of the wireless pie for even a goliath like Nokia to rest on its laurels for years on end. Yet, until just very recently, it seemed content to do just that, slipping out incremental tweaks to S60 on refined hardware while half-heartedly throwing a bone to the "the future is touch!" crowd by introducing S60 5th Edition alongside forgettable devices like the 5800 XpressMusic and N97. A victim of its own success, the company that had helped define the modern smartphone seemed either unwilling or unable to redefine it.

Not all is lost, though. As S60 has continued to pay the bills and produce modern, lustworthy devices like the E71 and E72, the open, Linux-based Maemo project has quietly been incubating in the company's labs for over four years. What began as a geeky science experiment (a "hobby" in Steve Jobs parlance) on the Nokia 770 tablet back in 2005 matured through several iterations -- even producing the first broadly-available WiMAX MID -- until it finally made the inevitable leap into smartphone territory late last year with the announcement of the N900. On the surface, a migration to Maemo seems to make sense for Nokia's long-term smartphone strategy; after all, it's years younger than S60 and its ancestry, it's visually attractive in all the ways S60 is not, and it was built with an open philosophy from the ground up, fostering a geeky, close-knit community of hackers and devs from day one. Thing is, Nokia's been absolutely emphatic with us -- Maemo's intended for handheld computers (read: MIDs) with voice capability, while S60 continues to be the choice for purebred smartphones.

So, back to that fork in the road we'd mentioned. In one direction lies that current strategy Nokia is trumpeting -- continue to refine S60 through future Symbian revisions (with the help of the Symbian Foundation) and keep pumping out pure-profit smartphones in the low to midrange while sprinkling the upper end of the market with a Maemo device here and there. In the long term, though, running two platforms threatens to dilute Nokia's resources, cloud its focus, and confuse consumers, which leads us to the other direction in the fork: break clean from Symbian, develop Maemo into a refined, powerhouse smartphone platform, and push it throughout the range.

Our goal here is to test the N900, of course, but fundamentally, that's the question we tried to keep in the backs of our minds for this review: could Maemo ultimately become the platform of Nokia's future? Let's dig in.



Nokia N900 Specifications
Display

- 3.5 inch touch-sensitive widescreen display
- 800 × 480 pixel resolution

Language support

- British English, American English, Canadian French, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Swedish, Russian

Connectivity

- 3.5mm AV connector
- TV out (PAL/NTSC) with Nokia Video Connectivity Cable
- Micro-USB connector, High-Speed USB 2.0
- Bluetooth v2.1 including support for stereo headsets
- Integrated FM transmitter
- Integrated GPS with A-GPS

Battery

- BL-5J 1320mAh

Processor and 3D accelerator

- TI OMAP 3430: ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz, PowerVR SGX with OpenGL ES 2.0 support

Memory

- Up to 1GB of application memory (256 MB RAM, 768 MB virtual memory)

Size and weight

- Volume: Approx 113cc
- Dimensions: 110.9 × 59.8 × 18 (19.55 at thickest part) mm
- Weight: Approx 181g
Mass memory

- 32 GB internal storage
- Store up to 7000 MP3 songs or 40 hours of high-quality video
- Up to 16 GB of additional storage with an external microSD card

Keys and input method

- Full QWERTY tactile keyboard
- Full QWERTY onscreen keyboard

Colour

- Black

Operating frequency

- Quad-band GSM EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
- WCDMA 900/1700/2100 MHz

Data network

- GPRS class A, multislot class 32, maximum speed 107/64.2 kbps (DL/UL)
- EDGE class A, multislot class 32, maximum speed 296/177.6 kbps (DL/UL)
- WCDMA 900/1700/2100. Maximum speed PS 384/384 kbps (DL/UL)
- HSPA 900/1700/2100. Maximum speed PS 10/2 Mbps (DL/UL) WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g

Call features

- Integrated hands-free stereo speakers
- Call waiting, call hold, call divert
- Call timer
- Logging of dialed, received and missed calls
- Speed dialing via contact widget
- Virbrating alert (internal)
- Side volume keys
- Mute/unmute
- Contacts with images
- Conference calling with up to 3 participants
- Internet calling

Email & Messaging

- Supported protocols: Mail for Exchange, IMAP, POP3, SMTP
- Support for email attachments
- Support for rich HTML
- SMS, MMS, and Instant Messages as conversations
- Support for Nokia Messaging service
- Instant messaging and presence enhanced contacts
- Multiple number, email and Instant Messaging details per contact, contacts with images
- Support for assigning images to contacts

Web browsing

- Maemo browser powered by Mozilla technology
- Adobe Flash™ 9.4 support
- Full screen browsing

GPS and navigation

- Integrated GPS, Assisted-GPS, and Cell-based receivers
- Pre-loaded Ovi Maps application
- Automatic geotagging

Camera

- 5 megapixel camera (2584 × 1938 pixels)
- Image formats: JPEG
- CMOS sensor, Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar lens
- 3 × digital zoom
- Autofocus with assist light and two-stage capture key
- Dual LED flash
- Full-screen viewfinder
- Photo editor on device
- TV out (PAL/NTSC) with Nokia Video Connectivity Cable (CA-75U, included in box) or WLAN/UPnP
- Landscape (horizontal) orientation
- Capture modes: Automatic, portrait, video, macro, landscape, action

Video

- Wide aspect ratio 16:9 (WVGA)
- Video recording file format: .mp4; codec: MPEG-4
- Video recording at up to 848 × 480 pixels (WVGA) and up to 25fps
- Video playback file formats: .mp4, .avi, .wmv, .3gp; codecs: H.264, MPEG-4, Xvid, WMV, H.263

Music and audio playback

- Maemo media player
- Music playback file formats: .wav, .mp3, .AAC, .eAAC, .wma, .m4a
- Built-in FM transmitter
- Ring tones: .wav, .mp3, .AAC, .eAAC, .wma, .m4a
- FR, EFR, WCDMA, and GSM AMR
- Digital stereo microphone
- DLNA

Personalisation

- Background pictures
- Widgets on your desktops
- Intelligent contact shortcuts
- Shortcuts to your favourite websites
- Shortcuts to applications
- Themes

Operating system

- Maemo 5 software on Linux

Applications

- Maemo Browser
- Phone
- Conversations
- Contacts
- Camera
- Photos
- Media player
- Email
- Calendar
- Ovi Maps
- Clock
- Notes
- Calculator
- PDF reader
- File manager
- RSS reader
- Sketch
- Games
- Widgets
- Application manager for downloads

Gaming

- Bounce
- Chess
- Mahjong

What's in the box

- Nokia N900
- Nokia Battery (BL-5J)
- Nokia High Efficiency Charger (AC-10)
- Nokia Stereo Headset (WH-205)
- Video out cable (CA-75U)
- Nokia charger adaptor (CA-146C)
- Cleaning cloth