Ports and quality issues usually go hand-in-hand. From Palm’s infamous SUDS and headphone issues, to various other eekers – if devices break down en masse, one can suspect that an external port is the culprit in many a case.
Nokia seems to join the camp – the image below shows one of many N900’s with a broken MicroUSB port:
So far, Nokia Care centres have not been able to figure out what to do: Nokia says that they must repair it for free, while others charge quite a bit of money for the fix…
Don’t ask me why, but it looks like Nokia has some issues promoting its next “super box”. I don’t really have any other explanation for the video below, which shows a Nokia N900 barely managing to “run” Mac OS X via an emulator:
Its creator Toni Nikkanen describes it as follows:
As you can see from the heavily edited video, it took almost 2 hours to reach the “About my Mac…” window. Keep your eye on the time display as that will give you an impression of just how uselessly slow it is. The emulator I used was the latest CVS snapshot of PearPC, which to my eye appears to be pretty good quality code, built without problems in Scratchbox. I experimented with the various frontends and finally settled on the SDL one, since support for the mouse cursor seemed to work best there. As in my previous emulation attempts, I used x11vnc to remotely control the mouse from a laptop sitting nearby. And once again the screen size of N900 was slightly too little to run something that expects a desktop-size display.
Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://www.tuug.fi/~toni/serendipity/index.php?/archives/13-Mac-OS-X-10.3-running-on-the-N900!.html
Hot on the heels of the recent batch of firmware enhancements, Nokia Conversations has just announced the second firmware update for the N900. Unlike the first, which only enabled the Ovi Store, we are looking at a real bugfix release here:
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First up is support for the Swiss keymat variant with hardware and virtual keyboard layouts supporting the combination of German, Italian and English characters. We’ll also see full compatibility with certain SIM cards from network operator 3. Although only a small number of SIM cards were impacted at the time, this release means the N900 is now fully compatible with 3 SIM cards.
Mail for Exchange also sees an update which will it allow it to work with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. This should bring the possibility of Exchange integration to a much broader group of users.
Ovi Maps also gets the update treatment, with improvements made to search performance and route calculation. Beyond these major changes come a range of smaller usability improvements which have been worked into the release and are based on the excellent user feedback the team have received (keep it coming).
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DataViz’s Documents to Go can be considered the staple food of the mobile industry: it runs on almost every platform, and tends to offer largely the same features on all of them. This is due to an underlying platform-independence technology, which makes porting easy.
Thus, nobody should be too surprised to see the announcement below – the N900 now supports Documents to Go:
Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/maemo/index.html?redirect=Maemo
Access Co’s Garnet VM offers people who dislike smartphones a PDAesque experience on a Nokia Nxxx web tablet. It has actually done this for some time, and was met with general happiness.
The product has now been updated to “beta 5″ – while still not final, Access claims compatibility with more than 80% of Palm OS applications currently on the market.
More can be found at the URL below:
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/index.html
P.S. According to various sources, the N900 is not supported currently.
Don’t ask me what’s going on here. Nokia’s N900 has not been shipped yet – but prices are already coming down.
Amazon USA currently sells the device more than 50$ below Nokia’s official asking price of 649$:
So much for pre-ordering…
Rumors about T-Mobile’s Project Dark have predicted the wildest of exploits from one of the smallest US carriers. Some predicted the release of the N900, others predicted other stuff, while others bet on a set of all-you-can-eat tariffs.
All those of you who have been hoping for a release of the N900 have now been disappointed – the carrier has just introduced the offer below:
As of now, no further releases are expected. However, there is one more bit of hope: the device will drop in November, which might bring an announcement then…
Nokia’s N900 is hotly awaited by most: it is the first Maemo device which does not depend on an external cell phone for EVDO data service, and can furthermore place voice calls.
Unfortunately, it looks like the box will be delayed. An official statement on maemo.org now reads as following:
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The Nokia N900 is a great example of what we and the open source community have been able to achieve with Maemo software. We are working closely with open source developers and for example, at the Maemo Summit in October, we loaned 300 pre-production units to get more feedback from the community. This feedback is extremely important to us and as such we also want to provide the best user experience with the Nokia N900.
We expect it to start shipping during November 2009.
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As of now, no further information is available…
Nokia’s N900 has barely hit the road – yet NokiaPort.de has already uploaded the image below (which has since been yanked):
As of now, all we know about the critter is that it will not have a keyboard (touchscreen-only) and is expected to drop at the 2010 edition of the Mobile World Congress in February.
Nokia recently held an event on all things Maemo – and stated quite a bit on the future of the platform. Unfortunately, the slides have not been made available to the public so far…
UMPCPortal.com has now shared part of the presentation held – two key slides are below. First of all, the obvious one – Maemo 6 will support multi-touch:
And then, another one which will likely delight developers – Maemo will also be targetable via QT:
Hit the link above for a few extra slides if you feel like it…
Nokia’s S60 handsets once were at the forefront of the mobile browser wars. Unfortunately, the manufacturer has slacked off quite a bit since…and ended up in the middle of the field.
However, the Finnish company definitely can deliver proper web experiences. The video below covers key aspects of the N900’s internet browser:
Even though it doesn’t have too much to do with S60, it nevertheless shows what Nokia can do – now all we need to do is wait and see whether they are also willing to do it…
So far, all reviews of the N900 were made by news sites which weren’t specialized on Symbian or S60 – they thus focused on hardware and software quality, but did not compare it to the established S60 operating system.
Fortunately, this has now changed. The boys at my-symbian’s got their hands onto a prototype, and ended up impressed:
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Even now, at the previewed unit’s early development stage, the N900 truly impressed me with its FANTASTIC PERFORMANCE, STABILITY (it was really ROCK STABLE, take my word), BEAUTIFUL and ADVANCED user interface, very high quality and full integration of TELEPHONY and INTERNET CONNECTIVITY, fast and powerful web browser, great support for VoIP (especially Skype), high quality camera and video recording and, actually, ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE. I don’t remember being that excited with any mobile device since the first Nokia Communicators and UIQ 2 phones. Really! Multiple questions posted on the forums about how the N900 compares to existing Symbian OS phones can only get one answer: they just DON’T compare, the N900 is a wholy different league. If any of the existing mobile devices can be (honestly) called a mobile computer then the N900 deserves such a name in the first place.
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Hit the link above for a load of shots…
Nokia’s N900 looks very similar to the N97. The real differences are below the hood – while the N97 runs Symbian, the N900 is powered by a Linux-derived operating system called Maemo.
Maemo has not had phone functionality so far: the N900 is the first-ever Maemo phone. This obviously makes room for interesting speculation on the quality of the UI…
Eldar Murtasin from mobile-review has sat down to create one of his usual, ultra-long reviews…and ended up pretty impressed with the platform. Of course, this being a v1 release, some eekers like the one below remain:
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Unfortunately the fact that Internet Tablets developed more as mobile computers rather than cell phones didn’t allow Nokia to implement the portrait screen setup for the vast majority of features and applications, including the browser and this is a huge drawback. Most mobile devices allow seamless screen rotation and gesture-based navigation, whereas Maemo can only offer landscape orientation, which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but can easily make the browsing experience awkward at times.
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Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-maemo5-en.shtml
All those of you who are desperate for a Nokia N900 can now fulfill their desires if they happen to live in Germany or Italy – the local subsidiaries in these countries have just started to offer the handset:
As usual: keep in mind that Nokia has f**ed over customers who pre-order handsets in the past, sometimes forcing them to wait weeks after retail release. I never give out interest-free loans – if anybody of you feels different, don’t feel deterred!
Nokia’s long-rumored N900 tablet has just been released. Read on for all we just got (and stay tuned – more Symbian content is coming in the near future):
Press release
First of all, here is a look at the official press release:
Espoo, Finland – Nokia today marked the next phase in the evolution of Maemo software with the new Nokia N900. Taking its cues from the world of desktop computing, the open source, Linux-based Maemo software delivers a PC-like experience on a handset-sized device.
The Nokia N900 has evolved from Nokia’s previous generation of Internet Tablets and broadens the choice for technology enthusiasts who appreciate the ability to multitask and browse the internet like they would on their desktop computer.
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More multitasking with Maemo
The Nokia N900 packs a powerful ARM Cortex-A8 processor (editor: 600MhZ), up to 1GB of application memory and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration. The result is PC-like multitasking, allowing many applications to run simultaneously. Switching between applications is simple, as all running content is constantly available through the dashboard. The panoramic homescreen can be fully personalized with favorite shortcuts, widgets and applications.To make web browsing more enjoyable, the Nokia N900 features a high-resolution WVGA touch screen and fast internet connectivity with 10/2 HSPA and WLAN. Thanks to the browser powered by Mozilla technology, websites look the way they would on any computer. Online videos and interactive applications are vivid with full Adobe Flash(TM) 9.4 support. Maemo software updates happen automatically over the internet.
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The Nokia N900 has 32GB of storage, which is expandable up to 48GB via a microSD card. For photography, the Maemo software and the N900 come with a new tag cloud user interface that will help users get the most out of the 5MP camera and Carl Zeiss optics.
The Nokia N900 will be available in select markets from October 2009 with an estimated retail price of EUR 500 excluding sales taxes and subsidies. The Nokia N900 will be displayed at Nokia World, Stuttgart, on September 2. More information on Maemo is available at http://maemo.nokia.com.
Image gallery
Datasheet (PDF)
Finally, here is a link to a PDF datasheet provided by Nokia Press:
http://tamss60.tamoggemon.com/contents/2009/August/than900released/Nokia_N900_data_sheet.pdf
