Nokia n900 in the eyes of a Symbian Modder

Recently, I was allowed to trial a Nokia n900. Here, I will share my insights on the device and the Maemo operating system.

Summary

Pros

• Great value for price.
• Relatively easy to use UI
• Great camera.
• Physical QWERTY keyboard.
• Heavily customizable and modifiable.
• Awesome browser with Ad Blocking.
• Feature-packed.
• Huge internal memory
• 800 x 400 Screen resolution.
• Supoprt for DivX and XviD
• Good music output through headphones.

Cons

• Poor battery life
• Resistive touch screen
• Limited OVI Suite/ PC Suite support.
• Quite bulky and heavy.
• No Portrait mode.
• Poor music output through built-in speakers.
• OVI Maps with no free navigation.

In a week's time, I have tested and used the n900 to a point where charging at least twice a day is must. It has poor battery life to begin with but more of that later. I had no knowledge of Maemo prior to trial but getting around using it took a very short span of time.

When I first got the device running, I immediately noticed the weight and bulkiness of the device.But to undermine the weight and bulkiness was the sheer sleekness of the device. When I first held it, It felt like I was holding a very robust and stable device.

The camera has a lens cover which is sliding, great to protect the 5MP lens. There's also a kickstand for watching.

When I started using the device, I quickly became accustomed to the physical buttons that were present in the device, including the QWERTY keyboard. It's much like a PC, even the ctrl+c copy shortcut works which I found to be very useful.

It is quite crowded in the QWERTY keyboard and my huge hands occasionally had problems pressing keys every once in a while but the easy to press buttons made up for that quirk.

There are also other buttons like the power button, camera shutter button, lock/unlock slider, and volume slider keys that occasionally make life easier while using the device.

While using Maemo for the first time, I noticed a huge improvement in the User Interface. 4 Homescreens with choices between bookmarks, shortcuts, contacts or widgets truly is easy to use. One thing of a big improvement against the Sybmian operating system is the one touch method that Maemo uses. Everything is one touch away and user friendly. Everything is intuitive and fluid. Another thing you would notice is the "landscape only" view in which well, it's only usable in landscape mode. This is something new to me and to be honest, I did miss one or two features that worked better in portrait mode. There are a few applications that do work in portrait mode like the dialer but I'd rather see support for the entire OS. However, there is Rotatedaemon which gives support for the OS and applications but it's not quite stable yet.

The image and music gallery is fluid even with thousands of songs and photos. And messages are shown in a threaded view. The task manager is something new for Nokia as it shows images of the currently running applications in the background.

One thing I did miss is the alpha-numeric keypad for texting. There is FastSMS that supports this mode but it can only be used in T9 mode.

The big thing that I love about this UI is the ability to customize it. Everything from the operator logo to the battery indicator can be customized and it only takes a few touches to download the necessary applications. I'm no Linux user but the great online community really does make it easy for everyone to know how to use and customize this device. You can get to their vast online community at Maemo.org.

A quick yet sweet statement. DivX and XviD playback support is available in the default media  player. These means your Blu Ray movies that you'd like to convert to DivX and play through your device won't be such a pain anymore.

A few things that are lacking when it comes to functionality however are MMS and the FM Radio. I don't know why it's not included but there are third party applications that are available to be able to use these. A cool thing though is it has an FM transmitter. Basically, you can play music on your device through that and fire up the radio on your car and tune to a radio station that is non-existent and set your device to the same frequency and voila, instant streaming music.

Another notable thing is the file manager. It's very simple and quite frankly almost the same as Symbian's file manager. Copy, cut, rename and delete functions are available.

When Media functionality is questioned, this device does great. Not the best, but great. Let's start off with music and videos.

Music is great when plugged played through the headphones. I have a pair of cheap TDKs which I tested on the device and even at half volume, It performed very well, giving out great bass while still maintaining clarity in mid range and high range sounds. However, when I played it through the loudspeaker, I found it to be weak and quite frankly poor.

The camera is sort of a hit and miss deal here. With a 5MP Carl Zeiss Lens with dual LED flash, it produces somewhat different results. The images are okay for this type of camera. There is a lot of noise produced but the colors are vivid and contrast is great. Videos are somewhat lacking the frames per second that I'm accustomed to. Here are some sample photos. Some are in low light conditions.

If you want to see the full sized images, head over to the album here.

Album Link

One amazing thing about this device is the connectivity features. For one thing, the browser is great to use. It is Mozilla based, yes, the guys who made Firefox. The rendering is awesome for a mobile browser and pages are displayed great! Apart from the zooming thorugh spinning gesture (create a spiral clockwise or counterclockwise to zoom in and out, respectively) you can zoom by using the volume rocker keys. This is one great feature I'm particularly happy about.

And ways to connect through the internet include a b/g WiFi connectivity option. Pretty common among smartphones but using it on the n900 somehow feels faster compared to others.

OVI Maps is also included but there is no free navigation unlike its Symbian counterpart. This somehow disappoints me as every cheaper Nokia smartphone has free navigation.

I'm not a fan of mobile gaming but the n900 also contains games like blocks, chess, mahjong and marbles.

So, with all that said. It's a pretty okay device. Within a week of testing and multiple battery charging due to a somewhat low battery capacity, I've reached a verdict. With a tag price, here in the Philippines, of about Php21900.00 or $484.13 U.S. it's a great  all in one device. way cheaper than the Nexus One, iPhone 3Gs or other smartphones of its class.