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The UI is completely finger-friendly and is in direct opposition to S60 5th Edition with its touch UI glued on top of S60 feel. Maemo is a completely separate OS with none of the legacy baggage of S60. Scrolling through lists works much like the iPhone or other well-designed touch screen phones and there's no odd reverse scrolling or tiny scrollbars as there is with S60 5th Edition. Nokia includes a stylus in the phone's silo, but there's no need for it unless you want to write, draw or click in tiny web page links (a fingernail also works well for link tapping). The UI is fairly fresh and unique (there are a few design elements that are similar to Android) and we enjoyed its consistency and intuitiveness. For example you can tap on the screen in any application to bring up a close box "x" in the upper right corner and a minimize and return to desktop function by tapping on the multiple window symbol at the upper left corner. When a screen or dialog demands your response, background windows are blurred out of focus, so you're not confused by stacked windows and wondering which one you're supposed to tap on. You can get out of any window by tapping in the upper right hand corner of the blurred background. Though the screen is resistive rather than capacitive, we had no complaints with responsiveness and control. It requires a slightly firmer touch than the capacitive iPhone but a softer touch than most S60 5th Edition and Windows Mobile phones. There's no multi-touch for things like pinch zooming, so you'll have to double-tap on the screen to zoom in the web browser, or use on-screen zoom controls in applications like Ovi Maps. The display is easily viewable outdoors. In the 2.2009.51-1 firmware update released in mid-Janary 2010, Nokia added support for portrait web browsing. You'll need to hit Cntrl-shift-o (that's the letter o and not zero) when in the web browser to turn on portrait support. Once you've done that, if you close the keyboard and turn the device to portrait orientation, the browser will switch the display. Rotate it back to return to landscape mode. Video Review Here's our video review of the Nokia N900, and you can get a much better feel for the user interface and responsiveness of the phone by watching the video. We also cover the web browser, GPS mapping, video playback and more.
Design and Ergonomics The N900 has a side-slider design with a full QWERTY keyboard. It's a minimalist and not unattractive device but it doesn't have the sexy wow-factor of thin phones like the HD2 and iPhone. I'd say it's more attractive than the Droid, but looks are subjective. Though shorter and narrower than the HTC HD2, it's much thicker and you'll feel the N900 in your pocket. It has a rounded rectangle design and it looks, well, like a Nokia. The build quality and slider mechanism are solid and the non-gloss back is a plus. The screen does attract and hold onto fingerprints, though it's bright and sharp enough to be readable even when totally mucked-up with grease. The keyboard has fairly low key travel but the keys are clicky and you can turn on sound effects for key presses which helps. After using it for a day, the keyboard really grew on me and I found it easy to type quickly, despite the offset spacebar.
The N900's hardware keyboard. You can also turn on the on-screen keyboard if you like. In keeping with the minimalist design and touch screen focus, there are very few hardware buttons. The combined camera launcher and shutter button are on the right side for natural placement when held like a camera. The power button, midway down the right side turns off the phone when pressed and held and with a short press brings up a set of menus to switch to offline mode, lock the screen and keys (the phone automatically locks when the slider is closed and you unlock it with an on-screen slider or the hardware slider), switch to silent mode and when in an application there's a menu item to bring up the phone dialer. The volume keys are on the upper right and the hardware screen/key lock is on the bottom along with the micro USB port and 3.5mm stereo headset jack. There are stereo speakers on the top and bottom edges (or sides when held in landscape mode) and an IR port on the right side (most likely use would be home theater remote control applications developed by 3rd parties). There are no buttons on the front face. A front-facing VGA camera lives above the display, but the phone currently doesn't support 3G video calling and there are no VoIP apps that currently support video calling (we'd love to see video calling via Skype!).
The camera lens lives on the back and is protected by a sliding door. Open the door and the camera application automatically launches. As with the Nokia N96, a pop-out ring surrounding the lens doubles as a desk stand.
Phone and Internet As per usual with Nokia phones, the N900 has excellent reception and call quality. We've never seen so many bars of 3G HSDPA on T-Mobile's US network here in the Dallas area. Both incoming and outgoing call quality are impressive though we wish the earpiece were a bit louder for use in noisy places. We had no trouble hearing callers in in the office but it was hard to hear when in a noisy big box store. Reception in our area is relatively strong and we had no dropped calls nor did calls suffer when transitioning from GSM to 3G. The N900 lacks advanced call features like voice dialing (though given Nokia's track record with voice dialing, we're not sure we want to see it on the N900) and last number redial. It does have speed dialing, reliable voicemail notifications (though the number 1 isn't automatically assigned to voicemail, but should be in a future firmware), call history and an impressive selection of well-integrated Internet calling services. From the standard phone dialer you can make calls using Google Talk, Skype, Ovi, Jabber and SIP. Simply enter your login credentials in the phone account setup screen and select a contact to call. You'll see options for cellular calling and any VoIP internet calling services you've set up. Very, very nice! No separate application and geeky settings to fight with. The contacts application is the poster child for multi-paradigm communications. Select a contact, and assuming you've got email, mobile, land line and etc. entered for that contact, you can tap buttons to call the person, Internet call that person, SMS them, email them and so on. Contact fields generally mirror Outlook with multiple email addresses, phone numbers, note, job title, nickname, web page and physical addresses. There are no categories however. Bluetooth headsets were a mixed bag. We found that the Plantronics Discovery 925 and the Plantronics Discovery 655 both had good voice quality for incoming and outgoing calls. The Samsung WEP870 sounded overly digitized and hard to understand on the outgoing end and the Jabra Stone sounded just OK. The Jawbone 2 sounded tinny on the incoming end and distorted for outgoing voice. Perhaps Nokia needs to tweak their Bluetooth in a firmware update.
The web browser is the best we've ever seen on a mobile platform. If you're totally into the web, this is your phone. This is the "real Internet" and it's better than the iPhone's Safari web browser since it supports Flash 9.4 and plugins. The Mozilla-based browser handles AJAX, Javascript, frames, CSS and most everything a desktop browser does. The only thing missing is pinch zooming but that's impossible on the N900's resistive screen. Instead you'll double-tap the screen to zoom or use the volume up/down buttons or swirl your finger in a circle (our least favorite since it's hard to control). The browser works with the desktop version of youtube.com and with youtube videos embedded in web pages (such as the page you're reading now). While Nokia S60 phones have offered Flash support, their low resolution and slow performance hampered the experience. The N900 does a very good job of playing Flash video as long as you have a good 3G or WiFi connection. Nice! Web pages look like their desktop counterparts and you get the desktop version of the New York Times, CNN and BBC rather than mobile versions. Embedded video on the New York Times home page didn't play (we're not sure what format they're using) but Flash-based ads run for better or worse. If you get sick of seeing ads, there's an ad blocking utility you can download using the app download program on the phone. Email and Syncing The Nokia has good email support as well as IM, and there's SMS but no MMS (again, something we're hoping for in a future firmware update). The email client supports POP, IMAP, gmail and Exchange email (via Mail for Exchange). The phone supports HTML email, checking email on a schedule and checking email only when a certain connection is available (i.e.: WiFi). The phone supports Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 support was added in a January 2010 firmware update. Google sync of contacts and calendar items over Mail for Exchange is sadly not supported. Though MfE sync with Google works fine for us as long as we set it to sync calendar and contacts but not email (you can set up email separately in the email client). PC Suite syncing (not the newer Ovi desktop sync) works well with Outlook in Windows, but there's no iSync plugin for Mac OS X. The N900 doesn't sync with Nokia's Ovi online yet either.
The stylus, 3.5mm jack, screen/key lock slider and speaker. GPS and Ovi Maps Yes, the N900 has a built in GPS with aGPS and it comes with Ovi Maps 1.00 for Maemo. The GPS worked well in our tests, and managed a fix even indoors and kept up with brisk driving. No, there's no Google Maps, at least not yet. But Ovi Maps has attractive and clear maps, good US POIs and passable turn-by-turn on-screen directions. There are no spoken directions, making the N900 less than a perfect co-pilot when driving. Will spoken directions come in a later Ovi Maps release, will 3rd parties release navigation applications for Maemo 5? We hope so. In the meanwhile, Ovi Maps' price is hard to beat: free. You can download maps over the air as needed, or side load them. Camera The news is all good here: the N900 has an Nseries level camera that takes excellent photos and very good video. The 5 megapixel camera has a Carl Zeiss Tessar autofocus lens and a dual LED flash. We like the active lens cover that protects and launches the camera application when you slide it open (and exits the camera when you close the lens cover). The camera button functions as the shutter button, which is more stable than tapping on the display like the HTC HD2. The camera can also shoot video at 848 x 480 resolution at 25fps with 48 kHz AAC stereo audio, and quality is quite good as you'd expect from a high end Nokia. When shooting video, the lens does an initial focus on the center of the frame rather than using a fixed focus on infinity. The N900's images are comparable to the N95 and N96's, and are far superior to the HTC HD2's. Here's a comparison of two cropped photos from the N900 and HD2:
As you can see the Nokia's image is sharper with much more detail. The photo is just slightly too cool, but the HD2's is overly skewed to the magenta and lacks real detail. The N900 ships with a TV out cable that terminates in standard RCA connections. You can view photos and videos taken with its camera on the TV, and in fact you can view anything on the TV, even games.
Multimedia Older Maemo Internet tablets were picky about video file formats but the N900 is the swiss army knife of mobile video playback. It can handle MPEG4, Flash Video, AVI, 3GPP, H.264 and WMV formats. We found that even high bitrate videos encoded at 1500kbps played well as long as we kept the resolution at 800 x 480 or less (comparable to DVD resolution). The N900's multimedia player reminds us of the clean and simple Sony/Sony Ericsson UI with a large icon-based launcher for songs, video, Internet radio and song shuffle playback. The main UI tells you how many songs, video tracks and Internet radio stations are available/stored on the 32 gig flash drive and microSD card. The music player starts with a large album cover view that's attractive and modern. The player itself is fairly basic with shuffle and playlists but no EQ. Music playback quality is very good with a decent set of headphones (Nokia includes a better than average set of stereo earbuds with interchangeable ear gels) and pleasant through the built-in stereo speakers. The video player is thumbnail based and shows duration for each clip along with the title. There are 48 preset Internet radio stations from around the world (in other words, not all are English) and you can add more but that's not a simple task. Internet radio worked well for us over T-Mobile's 3G HSDPA connection and WiFi. The phone has an FM transmitter so you can stream audio to your car or home stereo but there's no FM radio application. Happily, there's a basic FM radio app available for free download and it gets good reception. The N900 has mass storage mode so you can mount it on the desktop using the included micro USB cable to copy music, videos and other content to and from the phone.
App Story It's all about the apps these days, or so some folks think. The magic actually comes when a good platform with appealing hardware and a great OS meet with a large selection of applications. Maemo 5 is a new OS and the N900's job in part is to get developers on board. Given Maemo's open source history, applications have so far been free and many have been ports from Linux. With Maemo 5 we're starting to see more "Joe Normal" apps instead of geeky ones. These include Documents To Go for viewing MS Office docs (currently the only pay-for Maemo 5 application, it costs $9.99 after the 30 day trial ends), an AP news widget, several weather widgets, games (so far mostly 2D though we expect some impressive 3D games given the Nokia's serious GPU and OpenGL ES 2.0 support), sketching applications, Witter (a Twitter app), a Facebook widget and more. Nokia's own Bounce game is a 3D showcase of what the N900 can do. It's as impressive as an iPhone 3D high quality game and we can't wait to see more. And yes, you can play it while the phone is hooked up to a TV! A shortcut to Maemo Select showcases current applications (around 50) but the Ovi Store for Maemo isn't yet up and running. We hope it will be available by January 2010. There's also an application manager so you can download apps from additional application repositories. But at the moment, the app story is that there isn't a huge selection but there seems to be significant developer interest. Only time will tell... Conclusion The N900 is what we'd hoped the Nokia N97 would have been: seriously impressive hardware matched with a fresh touch-based operating system. I'll stop just short of saying that the N900 puts the N97 and N97 Mini to shame because the N97 line has stronger phone features and these are phones, after all. But in every other way, the N900 is superior thanks to its truly modern, touch-optimized OS, fast CPU, excellent video playback performance, best in class web browser, Adobe Flash support and seamless switching between cellular and WiFi networks. If you're looking for a pocket computer first and a phone second, the Nokia N900, though still immature, earns a place with the HTC HD2, Motorola Droid and even the iPhone 3GS. Though we'd say that the iPhone's appeal is different-- it's better suited to those who prefer a super-simple user interface or who want myriad application downloads to keep things interesting. Things we'd like to see on the N900? More apps of course, more advanced phone features and better Bluetooth performance with headsets. All in all, a great start from Nokia after the mild disappointment that was S60 5th Edition. Maemo 5 is an OS that can compete with Android, webOS and HTC's Sense on Windows Mobile. When the first firmware update comes out (supposedly by the end of 2009) we'll update this review to cover what's changed.
Website: www.nokiausa.com Price: Approx. $550 with no contract, unlocked.
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