Nokia N900 review

Nokia used to be known for producing simple, effective phones, but then it jumped on the Symbian bandwagon and lumbered itself with the over-complicated S60 OS. But, at long last, the Finnish phone giant is striking out in a new direction, and its new top-end phone the N900 boasts a shiny new OS: the Linux-based Maemo 5.

Okay, so it’s not exactly the first time we’ve come across this operating system. Two years ago the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet ran an earlier version of the software and we liked it a lot, but with only Wi-Fi connectivity it was a niche product.

Quite why it took Nokia so long to launch Maemo on a phone is beyond us – the software is clearly far more suited to a modern touchcreen smartphone than Symbian S60 and we really like the way it works.

A new outlook

The first thing you see is a scrolling desktop that you can add shortcuts and widgets too, a bit like with Android phones. Tap an icon at the top of the screen, next to the notifications, and the application launch view hoves into view.

This makes it easy to find your way around the phone’s various tools and settings. Navigation of lists and menus makes absolute sense and you can flick lists around with your finger just as you’d expect to do. Multitasking is dealt with logically too: when one or more apps is running, the application grid launch icon in the top left of the screen transforms into a task view button.

Tap it and up comes the task view with thumbnails of all the apps running, tap it again and you get to the application launch, or you can choose to dismiss tasks with a single click.

Importantly, browsing the web is a much quicker and more reliable process than it is with the standard browser on S60-based Nokia phones. Maemo employs a browser built on the Mozilla codebase, so it’s no surprise to find it’s a big improvement. Indeed, connected to a Wi-Fi network with a fast internet connection, the N900 brought up the BBC homepage in an average of 8.3 seconds – on a par with the iPhone 3GS, which is the fastest phone in the business.

General navigation and page manipulation is handled elegantly. We particularly liked the gestures Nokia’s put in place, allowing you to zoom in and out of web pages by drawing a circle with your finger. A “hover” mode allows you to simulate a mouse – useful for pop-ups and dropdowns that only become available when you hover the mouse over them. And the large, high-resolution screen helps too. At 3.5in it may be the same size as an iPhone’s, but its 800 x 480 resolution makes pages – specifically text – a little easier on the eye.

Excitingly, the browser also supports Flash 9.4, so it will run embedded YouTube videos and even attempt BBC iPlayer playback. Watching embedded YouTube videos worked well too, but before you get your hopes up, note that iPlayer ran fitfully in our tests, even over a fast Wi-Fi link.

Specifications

Under the hood there’s plenty going on with all of the toys you’d expect from a top-end smartphone and some you wouldn’t. Data connectivity is well catered for, with Wi-Fi, HSDPA and Bluetooth. On the media front there’s a 3.5mm headphone socket, plus an FM tuner, FM transmitter (for wireless music playback through a radio), and 32GB to store your all your media on.

The camera, which boasts 5-megapixel resolution and a dual-LED flash unit, produces excellent pictures with balanced colour and good levels of detail. And the video mode lets you shoot 848 x 480 at 25fps – another notable feather in its cap.
The chassis feels well-knitted together too, with nary the hint of a creak coming from its big beefy body. The Qwerty keyboard that slides out from underneath the screen is pretty good too, with solid-feeling keys and a sensible layout that places the spacebar off centre, in easy reach of your right thumb.

Size matters

But elsewhere it’s a less positive outlook. There’s simply no getting around the fact that this is one chunky phone. Measuring 60mm wide and 18mm thick, it brings to mind smartphones of yesteryear such as the HTC TyTYN II, rather than sleek, slick handsets of today. And neither is the resistive touchscreen particularly modern, although this disappointment is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the screen is very sensitive.

And the problems continue. Oddly, although the N900 has an accelerometer, for most of the time the screen remains steadfastly in landscape mode. Only when viewing pictures does the screen rotate automatically the requisite 90 degrees. The selection of apps for an OS so young (in mobile phone terms) is understandably thin right now. On the Maemo Select and Maemo.org websites (OVI store for Maemo had yet to launch at the time of writing) we found under a 100 ready to install. And the OS isn’t completely glitch free, with occasional screen tearing during animations and dreadful performance in OVI Maps.

Finally, battery life is below average. After putting it through the mill for 24-hours, our test device had just 42% left on the clock. That’s around the same mark as the much larger and more luxurious HTC Touch HD2, and it lags behind the iPhone 3GS in the same test by around 10%.

Conclusion

Yet despite its problems, there’s something we like about Nokia’s new flagship smartphone. It’s quick, its OS is much better suited to a modern smartphone than the existing Nokia S60 platform, and it boasts a decent keyboard and screen to boot. It’s also packed with features, has a good camera and is available on surprisingly reasonable tariffs – not something we’d have expected so early on in its life.

The big problem for the N900 is the competition. The iPhone, Android phones like the HTC and RIM’s BlackBerry handsets have a massive head start in terms of available apps and the maturity of their respective operating systems, and unless something incredible happens in the near future, the situation looks likely to remain that way.

Details
Cheapest price on contract	£200
Contract monthly charge	£14.67
Contract period	24 months
Contract provider	www.mobiles.co.uk
Battery Life
Talk time, quoted	9hrs
Physical
Dimensions	60.3 x 19.7 x 110mm (WDH)
Weight	181g
Touchscreen	yes
Primary keyboard	Physical
Core Specifications
ROM size	32,000MB
Camera megapixel rating	5.0mp
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Display
Screen size	3.5in
Resolution	480 x 800
Landscape mode?	yes
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Software
OS family	Other