6:22 PM
Raj
If you are the kind who likes modding devices then you'll probably love this phone
Solid build quality, full QWERTY keypad, 32GB built-in memory plus microSD card slot, good audio quality, good web browser with full Flash support, decent camera, fast USB transfer speeds, extremely customizable OS, DivX/Xvid playback
Too thick and bulky, impossible to use single-handedly, dull display, no FM radio application, not much variety in terms of applications, bit sluggish at times
The Nokia N900 is the last from the Maemo camp of devices from Nokia. What started out as Internet tablets eventually ended as a smartphone in the form of the N900. The OS too underwent several changes over the years and in its latest version its as polished as it gets. The hardware is pretty good too. 3.5" 800 x 480 touchscreen display, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 32GB built-in memory, Wi-Fi, GPS and FM transmitter. The N900 is pretty feature packed. But is that enough to survive in today's cut throat competition. We decided to find out.
Bundle
- 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
The Hardware
The Nokia N900 is unlike any smartphone that I've seen in the past two years. Unlike most of them which try to be as slim as possible, the N900 design does not show the faintest signs that its designers ever even attempted to make it slimmer. It is 18mm thick, which is almost twice that of the iPhone 4. It's also incredibly heavy, weighing a pocket-stretching 181g. However, it's a pretty good looking device. The all back design looks really neat and classy, and it has a sense of calmness to it that, which gives you the sense that it is trying to hide something powerful underneath.
The front side of the phone is quite bare with nothing interesting to look at. No button, no fancy design element, nothing. Just the large 3.5" touchscreen display and a tiny earpiece grille at the top. Or should I say, the side. You see, unlike traditional phones, you don't hold the N900 vertically, portrait orientation, but horizontally. This is because despite the new telephony hardware, the N900 is still very much an Internet tablet like its predecessors, where sideways is the way to go.
If you look closely then you will also notice a lens for the front video camera above the earpiece. The proximity sensor and the ambient light sensor can also be found nearby.
Display
The display on the N900 is a 3.5" LCD with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, capable of displaying up to 65k colors. It uses resistive technology for the touch input. Now I have a few problems with the display. First of all it uses resistive technology for input. Now don't get me wrong, Nokia does make really good resistive touchscreens, probably the best. It's very responsive most of the time, but now having grown used to capacitive touchscreens, a resistive display just does not cut it any more. It also means there is no multi-touch support on-board.
The second problem with the display is the dull look of it. Images don't look lively or attractive on it. They do look sharp, thanks to the high resolution in a fairly compact area but they lack vibrance. Again, displays from phones like the Nexus One and Galaxy S have spoiled us, which makes the N900 display look even more dull in comparison. The 65k color support for the display seems too low. Gradients don't look smooth on the display, which makes things look worse.
Software
The Nokia N900 runs the Maemo 5 operating system, the OS of choice for Nokia's Internet tablets so far. This is by far the most polished and refined version of the OS yet and has been thoroughly optimized to work with fingers instead of a stylus. It is also visually more attractive and appealing than before.
Now lets give you a brief run through of the OS. Maemo 5 offers you a choice of up to four homescreens but you can use lesser if you desire. You can fill up the homescreens with widgets and shortcuts to applications and your bookmarks. You can move through the homescreens by swiping across the screen. You can have a panoramic wallpaper set which will pan across the four homescreens or you can have different wallpapers for each of your homescreens. The OS also supports themes, which can change the look of your background, icons, etc.
To go to the main menu, press the icon on the top left corner of the display. This will display all the applications that are available on the device. You can scroll up and down to see all the apps and newly installed application icons will appear at the bottom of the list by default. You can move the icons around though. Unfortunately, there is no support for folders to group similar applications such as games together.
Once you open an app, pressing the menu key on the top left shows you the dashboard. The dashboard is where you can see all the running apps. The icon for all the running apps are displayed in a grid with a button to quit them. You have to close each app manually and there is no way to close all at once. To go to the main menu again, you have to press the menu key on the top left. Everytime you exit an app you will be brought back to the dashboard if there are other applications running or to the homescreen. To go to the homescreen from the dashboard you have to press on an empty area somewhere on the top.
Overall I liked the look and feel of the UI and it definitely feels much, much better than the Symbian S60 5th Edition UI, but there are some problems. For one, at times in the interface, it isn't immediately apparent what to do. The OS just assumes that you will figure out; for example, how to exit to the homescreen. It does not tell you that you have to click the blank area on top of the dashboard or the main menu. This may not go down well with some users. But again, this phone isn't targeted at such users.
The N900 was never supposed to be a mass market device. It is targeted towards those select few who like to mess around with their devices. The N900 is a modder's dream and you can mod it as much as you like. People have managed to add features that are not already present on the device. Some have managed to overclock the processor all the way up to 1150 MHz. Some have even managed to run Android on it and make it run quite well. This is the kind of stuff that this phone was made for.
Another complaint I have with the UI is that sometimes it becomes inexplicably sluggish. The UI speed is never consistent and while at times it may be smooth, at other times it can be quite choppy. This can happen even if there is nothing heavy running in the background. Overall the UI never feels very snappy as such, but more along the lines of "acceptable". Considering the fact that there is nothing "acceptable" about the price tag, I found this a bit frustrating.
And lastly there is the issue that the device is primarily operated in landscape mode. This does make the device nearly impossible to be used single handedly. The only applications that do work in portrait mode is the web browser and the phone app.
As far as the applications are concerned, the phone comes with the standard suite of document viewers and PDF readers and a handful of games. You can obviously add more but for now the choice is painfully low. And considering the fact that this is the last device running this operating system one shouldn't be expecting a sudden rise in the number of apps any time in the future. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't any apps for it at all and apart from the few that exist on the Ovi Store, you can also head to Maemo.org for some nice ones that have been developed by the community and actually are much better that what you will find on the store. Just don't go expecting something like the App Store for the iOS, cause you won't get one.
Connectivity
The Nokia N900 is a quad band GSM 3.5G handset supporting HSDPA (10.2Mbps) and HSUPA (2Mbps). It also supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS and USB 2.0. The call quality and network reception was spotless on the N900. What I found really praiseworthy was the USB transfer speeds on the device. I could consistently get around 18 MB/s transfer speeds, which is really fast. And considering the enormous 32GB of storage space, you can even use the phone as a portable drive for transferring your files. Unfortunately, it is formatted in FAT32, so you cannot transfer files larger than 4GB in size.
The N900 comes with Nokia's Ovi Maps software for navigation. However, you don't get turn by turn voice guidance for this phone.
Web Browsing
The default web browser in N900 is a Mozilla-based browser called MicroB. I liked the performance of this browser. It was fast, feature-rich and the pages looked just as they should on it. The N900 also has Adobe Flash 9.4 player, which means it you can load all the flash content on the websites. The browser had a mouse-over function, which produced a mouse pointer on the screen. Therefore, certain functions that require the user to hover over using a mouse pointer can be accessed with this feature, otherwise not possible on touchscreen phones. The Flash performance was pretty solid and worked really well and better than what I've seen on devices so far.
To zoom into the page, you have to do a move your finger in circles on the screen and depending upon the direction you rotate the finger the page zooms in or out. You can also use the volume keys, but it is best to leave them to control the volume. Strangely by default the volume keys are assigned to zoom in the web browser and you have to manually change them to control the volume instead. You can also double tap anywhere on that screen to zoom into that section and tap again to zoom out. One annoyance was that once you scroll down there was no way to jump to the top of a page and you would have to manually scroll all the way up.
N900 is also the only device right now on which you can officially install and use Firefox for mobile, also known as Fennec. To be honest, I wasn't too impressed with it. First of all it felt a bit sluggish compared to the built-in browser. Secondly, there was no Flash support. Also, the interface wasn't very user-friendly. To access additional options, you would need to swipe left on the screen. If you are on the very left of the screen then you would have to screen all the way to the right, so you can reach the edge and then swipe left, causing the browser window to shift right and reveal the extra options on the right pane. Similarly the tabs and bookmarks were on the left. It was annoying as it would often make you go through unnecessary steps when you want to access those options and at times when you didn't want to, an accidental left or right swipe would open the side panes.
The top bar was also not constantly part of the screen and if you were to scroll down it would drop off, so if you wanted to access it again you would need to scroll all the way to the top, with no easy way to get there if the page is too long. It just felt annoying to me, which is why I hardly used it and was using the default browser most of the time. One good thing about Firefox for mobile was that you could import all your desktop bookmarks and tabs, etc., thanks to the Firefox Sync add-on, but that wasn't reason enough for me to choose it over the standard browser.
Multimedia
The N900 has a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash. As mentioned before Nokia has thankfully provided a lens cover for the camera, which is much appreciated. I cannot even imagine how many fingerprints the lens would have accumulated due to the phone's landscape orientation, as your fingers would then constantly have rested where the lens is located.
The camera software is pretty basic on the N900. The interface is well designed and simple enough but there is a major lack of feature here. To me personally it does not matter as my only expectations from a mobile phone camera is that it should point and shoot and the quality of image is good. But some people would like to have features like smile detection, face detection, touch to focus, etc., all of which are absent on the N900.
The actual image quality is pretty decent. It is not great, but it is not bad either. The details are definitely quite decent, but the camera tends to excessively sharpen the images, which is apparent once you zoom into the images. There is also plenty of noise in the images, which only gets worse in low-light. The flash on the phone is pretty powerful but the problem is that when it is being used as the focus assist, it does not glow at its maximum intensity, because of which the camera cannot "see" the object that it is trying to focus on. Hence in low-light the camera often is unable to focus accurately, even though the object does fall within the range of the flash.
Verdict
The Nokia N900 is priced at Rs. 25,299 and is a bit of a mixed bag. There are somethings that it does well while others not so much. What's good about the phone is the design and wonderful build quality, the massive 32GB memory, decent camera, good web browser and good audio quality. The keypad is also pretty comfortable to type on and the video playback is good, if not great.
The display on the N900 is a 3.5" LCD with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, capable of displaying up to 65k colors. It uses resistive technology for the touch input. Now I have a few problems with the display. First of all it uses resistive technology for input. Now don't get me wrong, Nokia does make really good resistive touchscreens, probably the best. It's very responsive most of the time, but now having grown used to capacitive touchscreens, a resistive display just does not cut it any more. It also means there is no multi-touch support on-board.
The second problem with the display is the dull look of it. Images don't look lively or attractive on it. They do look sharp, thanks to the high resolution in a fairly compact area but they lack vibrance. Again, displays from phones like the Nexus One and Galaxy S have spoiled us, which makes the N900 display look even more dull in comparison. The 65k color support for the display seems too low. Gradients don't look smooth on the display, which makes things look worse.
Software
The Nokia N900 runs the Maemo 5 operating system, the OS of choice for Nokia's Internet tablets so far. This is by far the most polished and refined version of the OS yet and has been thoroughly optimized to work with fingers instead of a stylus. It is also visually more attractive and appealing than before.
Now lets give you a brief run through of the OS. Maemo 5 offers you a choice of up to four homescreens but you can use lesser if you desire. You can fill up the homescreens with widgets and shortcuts to applications and your bookmarks. You can move through the homescreens by swiping across the screen. You can have a panoramic wallpaper set which will pan across the four homescreens or you can have different wallpapers for each of your homescreens. The OS also supports themes, which can change the look of your background, icons, etc.
To go to the main menu, press the icon on the top left corner of the display. This will display all the applications that are available on the device. You can scroll up and down to see all the apps and newly installed application icons will appear at the bottom of the list by default. You can move the icons around though. Unfortunately, there is no support for folders to group similar applications such as games together.
Once you open an app, pressing the menu key on the top left shows you the dashboard. The dashboard is where you can see all the running apps. The icon for all the running apps are displayed in a grid with a button to quit them. You have to close each app manually and there is no way to close all at once. To go to the main menu again, you have to press the menu key on the top left. Everytime you exit an app you will be brought back to the dashboard if there are other applications running or to the homescreen. To go to the homescreen from the dashboard you have to press on an empty area somewhere on the top.
Overall I liked the look and feel of the UI and it definitely feels much, much better than the Symbian S60 5th Edition UI, but there are some problems. For one, at times in the interface, it isn't immediately apparent what to do. The OS just assumes that you will figure out; for example, how to exit to the homescreen. It does not tell you that you have to click the blank area on top of the dashboard or the main menu. This may not go down well with some users. But again, this phone isn't targeted at such users.
The N900 was never supposed to be a mass market device. It is targeted towards those select few who like to mess around with their devices. The N900 is a modder's dream and you can mod it as much as you like. People have managed to add features that are not already present on the device. Some have managed to overclock the processor all the way up to 1150 MHz. Some have even managed to run Android on it and make it run quite well. This is the kind of stuff that this phone was made for.
Another complaint I have with the UI is that sometimes it becomes inexplicably sluggish. The UI speed is never consistent and while at times it may be smooth, at other times it can be quite choppy. This can happen even if there is nothing heavy running in the background. Overall the UI never feels very snappy as such, but more along the lines of "acceptable". Considering the fact that there is nothing "acceptable" about the price tag, I found this a bit frustrating.
And lastly there is the issue that the device is primarily operated in landscape mode. This does make the device nearly impossible to be used single handedly. The only applications that do work in portrait mode is the web browser and the phone app.
As far as the applications are concerned, the phone comes with the standard suite of document viewers and PDF readers and a handful of games. You can obviously add more but for now the choice is painfully low. And considering the fact that this is the last device running this operating system one shouldn't be expecting a sudden rise in the number of apps any time in the future. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't any apps for it at all and apart from the few that exist on the Ovi Store, you can also head to Maemo.org for some nice ones that have been developed by the community and actually are much better that what you will find on the store. Just don't go expecting something like the App Store for the iOS, cause you won't get one.
The Nokia N900 is a quad band GSM 3.5G handset supporting HSDPA (10.2Mbps) and HSUPA (2Mbps). It also supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS and USB 2.0. The call quality and network reception was spotless on the N900. What I found really praiseworthy was the USB transfer speeds on the device. I could consistently get around 18 MB/s transfer speeds, which is really fast. And considering the enormous 32GB of storage space, you can even use the phone as a portable drive for transferring your files. Unfortunately, it is formatted in FAT32, so you cannot transfer files larger than 4GB in size.
The N900 comes with Nokia's Ovi Maps software for navigation. However, you don't get turn by turn voice guidance for this phone.
Web Browsing
The default web browser in N900 is a Mozilla-based browser called MicroB. I liked the performance of this browser. It was fast, feature-rich and the pages looked just as they should on it. The N900 also has Adobe Flash 9.4 player, which means it you can load all the flash content on the websites. The browser had a mouse-over function, which produced a mouse pointer on the screen. Therefore, certain functions that require the user to hover over using a mouse pointer can be accessed with this feature, otherwise not possible on touchscreen phones. The Flash performance was pretty solid and worked really well and better than what I've seen on devices so far.
To zoom into the page, you have to do a move your finger in circles on the screen and depending upon the direction you rotate the finger the page zooms in or out. You can also use the volume keys, but it is best to leave them to control the volume. Strangely by default the volume keys are assigned to zoom in the web browser and you have to manually change them to control the volume instead. You can also double tap anywhere on that screen to zoom into that section and tap again to zoom out. One annoyance was that once you scroll down there was no way to jump to the top of a page and you would have to manually scroll all the way up.
N900 is also the only device right now on which you can officially install and use Firefox for mobile, also known as Fennec. To be honest, I wasn't too impressed with it. First of all it felt a bit sluggish compared to the built-in browser. Secondly, there was no Flash support. Also, the interface wasn't very user-friendly. To access additional options, you would need to swipe left on the screen. If you are on the very left of the screen then you would have to screen all the way to the right, so you can reach the edge and then swipe left, causing the browser window to shift right and reveal the extra options on the right pane. Similarly the tabs and bookmarks were on the left. It was annoying as it would often make you go through unnecessary steps when you want to access those options and at times when you didn't want to, an accidental left or right swipe would open the side panes.
The top bar was also not constantly part of the screen and if you were to scroll down it would drop off, so if you wanted to access it again you would need to scroll all the way to the top, with no easy way to get there if the page is too long. It just felt annoying to me, which is why I hardly used it and was using the default browser most of the time. One good thing about Firefox for mobile was that you could import all your desktop bookmarks and tabs, etc., thanks to the Firefox Sync add-on, but that wasn't reason enough for me to choose it over the standard browser.
The N900 has a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash. As mentioned before Nokia has thankfully provided a lens cover for the camera, which is much appreciated. I cannot even imagine how many fingerprints the lens would have accumulated due to the phone's landscape orientation, as your fingers would then constantly have rested where the lens is located.
The camera software is pretty basic on the N900. The interface is well designed and simple enough but there is a major lack of feature here. To me personally it does not matter as my only expectations from a mobile phone camera is that it should point and shoot and the quality of image is good. But some people would like to have features like smile detection, face detection, touch to focus, etc., all of which are absent on the N900.
The actual image quality is pretty decent. It is not great, but it is not bad either. The details are definitely quite decent, but the camera tends to excessively sharpen the images, which is apparent once you zoom into the images. There is also plenty of noise in the images, which only gets worse in low-light. The flash on the phone is pretty powerful but the problem is that when it is being used as the focus assist, it does not glow at its maximum intensity, because of which the camera cannot "see" the object that it is trying to focus on. Hence in low-light the camera often is unable to focus accurately, even though the object does fall within the range of the flash.
The Nokia N900 is priced at Rs. 25,299 and is a bit of a mixed bag. There are somethings that it does well while others not so much. What's good about the phone is the design and wonderful build quality, the massive 32GB memory, decent camera, good web browser and good audio quality. The keypad is also pretty comfortable to type on and the video playback is good, if not great.
If you are the kind of person who likes to mod their device and play around with the firmware then you will probably love this phone, but not many people like to do that. They also won't like how large and heavy the phone is or that the quality of display is not as good as the one on their friend's Galaxy S or Nexus One. Also, how the phone cannot be operated with one hand. The hardware is not the best either and the N900 lacks the horsepower that recent smartphones pack in. It also seems a bit old and outdated in comparison to the fresh competition that is coming out these days from the Android camp.
It is for these reasons that I cannot recommend this phone. If you are going to spend 24,000 on a phone, then you might as well get the Motorola Milestone, which is much better overall. Unless, of course, you fall in that aforementioned minority, in which case look no further.
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