Nokia’s N95 was one of the first all-singing, all-dancing smartphones to be launched, and has since been followed by models from Apple, Samsung, BlackBerry and HTC. The Nokia N900 could signal Nokia’s intention to retake centre stage in the smartphone market.The manufacturer calls this a ‘smarter than smart’ phone, but we prefer to call it a ‘mini computer’. Indeed, while it looks like a somewhat chunky smartphone, specifically the Nokia N97, the operating system is more like a PC than a phone.

 

Style and handling on the Nokia N900

 

The Nokia N900 is a slider phone, which reveals a full QWERTY keyboard when you hold it horizontally. The sliding function is smooth with a nice snap, but the -million-colour, 3.5-inch TFT resistive touch-screen was a bit wobbly and doesn’t tilt like that on the N97.

 

As you can see from the photos, the fascia is free of keys, and we were expecting touch-keys to appear below the screen, but this didn’t happen either. In fact, the only hard keys on the whole device sit on the horizontal top of the device; they are volume/zoom keys, a dedicated camera key and the power button. There’s also a lock key for switching the display from standby.

 

Touch-screen on the Nokia N900

We confess that we tend to prefer a capacitive touch-screen, which requires gentle swipes of the finger, to a resistive touch-screen, which responds to finger pressure. But we’re happy to change our minds for the Nokia N900, which has the most tactile touch-screen we’ve used yet. When you press the screen, the phone vibrates in response, which is reassuring when you have no physical keys to use.

There are four home screens and to move between them you simply slide your finger from one side of the screen to the other; you have to take it all the way across though – sliding halfway will result in the screen snapping back to the same screen.

But even with a screen this good, there are flaws. Some of the icons took two attempts to press, and zooming in and out of web pages using the screen instead of the keys involved scrolling your finger clockwise to zoom in and anticlockwise to zoom out again. It worked well – just not very often. It’s too close to the motion for moving the position of the page, so we often ended up frustrated. The experience improved using the included stylus, though.

 

Phone function on the Nokia N900

So much has the Nokia N900 got going for it in terms of features and power, that it seems to have forgotten it’s a phone. Of course it makes calls, and the quality is perfectly good, but there’s no direct way to get your dialling function. And because there are no hard keys, you need to use the touch-screen to access it through the main menu or set a shortcut on one of your home screens. Making a call is one of the only times you can use the N900 in portrait mode; the other is when you view pictures.

 

Maemo 5 OS on the Nokia N900

The Nokia N900 sees the debut of the Maemo 5 operating system, an open-source OS not unlike Linux, which accounts for the Nokia N900’s PC-like qualities. We admit that some of the Maemo 5 technology goes straight over our heads – the N900 is very much a tech-heads’ phone – but there’s no mistaking what this phone can do. The biggest differences can broken down into two main factors.

The first is the phone’s powerful multitasking abilities. You can run loads of applications simultaneously without affecting performance, largely due to the 1GB of RAM that’s put aside just to keep the Nokia N900 running quickly. To move between apps, just swipe from side to side. To open a new one, minimise the app you’re in by pressing the tab on the left-hand side of the machine then open the new app normally. Keeping webpages running in the background effectively gives you live feeds. Of course, while speed is not affected by continuously running apps, there’s nothing Nokia can do to stop them draining your battery power.

Maemo 5’s second big plus point is that it is completely open, like Google Android, which means that anyone can develop applications for it. Apparently there are already 19,000 people working on more than 800 apps already, and Nokia hopes more will come forward to create a ‘community’ that caters for all customers. It will take a while to build up an extensive catalogue of applications, but you get that with the BlackBerry App World and Microsoft Windows Marketplace, and there are plenty already available. And you can download as much as you want and store it safely on the 32GB onboard memory. If even that’s not enough for you, you can add a 16GB microSD memory card to make up 48GB in total – the most memory on any mobile yet. Be aware, though, that the memory card isn’t included and you’ll have to buy your own.

 

Mobile movies on the Nokia N900

That awesome memory capacity also means you can store a shedload of music and videos. Video playback especially works brilliantly, supporting WMV, RealVideo, MP4, AVI, XviD and DivX formats amongst others. There’s a kickstand, albeit a flimsy one, underneath the camera lens that lets you watch the screen at a better angle, and a TV-out cable allows you to plug the N900 into your TV to watch on a bigger screen.

Playback quality is excellent even on a 40-inch screen, with no pixilation or distortion. This is great for gaming, and you could even use the Nokia N900 for presentations and slideshows.

 

Camera on the Nokia N900

Smartphone rivals the iPhone and HTC Hero both fell down when it came to cameras, so kudos to Nokia for including a five-megapixel camera on the Nokia N900. To operate it, open the sliding lens cover, and you’ll have access to a dual-LED flash and Carl Zeiss optics. There’s plenty of photographic options including tagging and geo-tagging, cropping pics, and uploading directly to Flickr and Ovi – although the photos were slightly drained of colour.

 

Verdict on the Nokia N900

We’ve never come across a handset with as much power as the Nokia N900 – we barely managed to scratch the surface of what it can do. For example, you can make free voice calls over Skype using the Wi-Fi connection, and there’s accurate A-GPS using Ovi Maps, which found our exact location down to our door number even when we were in the office.

Maemo 5 is a definite improvement on Symbian, which was beginning to feel a little tired, and with Maemo 6 on the way, Nokia is heading in a good direction.

But for all its prowess, we’re unsure about the Nokia N900’s mass-market appeal. It’s fantastic for internet, but not a natural at making calls, and it’s certainly not small. Early adopters will love it, but the layman may be somewhat daunted by all that power.

 

Buy The Nokia N900 Here