Myhphone – Mobile Phone Info Center

When we first saw the Nokia N900, we thought that it is just another handset from their popular N-series lineup product. But when we got more information about the device, then we realize that we are wrong, Nokia N900 is more than a handset and it is nothing to do with N-series.  Nokia N900, aka Nokia Rover, is the first ever internet tablet introduced by Nokia. Nokia already has some tablet on the market, but this is the first time Nokia put GSM module in a internet tablet. That’s mean Nokia N900 is not solely a handset, but also a device that  dedicated  for web browsing. So how is this device different from other smartphone on the market? Read on to check it out.

Design

Like some of the smartphone at the market, Nokia N900 has a side slider form factor design. That’s mean, you will see a full Qwerty sliding keypad on the phone. On the front, there is a large 3.5″ resistive touchscreen of WVGA resolution (800 x 480 pixels). The screen is support 16M colors and able to display great contrast, clear and vibrancy images, even under directly sunlight it is still usable. Unlike most of smartphones, there are no single button on the front but on the right side you’ll get the volume rocker, the power key and the camera button. Open the slider you will see the QWERTY keyboard that arranged in three rows. The keys are large and the press feedback and tactility is quite good as well. However, the problem with three row keypad is that every key has to serve two or even three symbols and it make you frequently have to press two buttons at the same time. This will affected the speed of typing. Nokia N900 measures at the size of 110.9 x 59.8 x 18 mm which is quite surprising us because we thought that being a tablet, it should has bigger size. But the fact is it is even smaller than the chubby Nokia N97 and HTC Touch pro2. However the weight of 181 grams, is the heaviest that we ever seen, I mean in mobile phone category. Overall, the build quality of the Nokia N900 is fine, though it is not small but it does feel solid.

OS and UI

Now come to the interesting part of the device. Nokia N900 is running  on the Linux platform Maemo 5 OS and it is handle by a ARM Cortex-A8 processor 600 MH that is same as in iPhone 3GS. On the homescreen, or desktop more correctly, there are 4  side-scrollable panel that you can fill with widgets. Each panel feature their own wallpapers, but you can switch off three of than and leave one to works. Beside the 4 panel, you are allows to add bookmarks and contacts too. To rearrange the widgets and add new ones to the panel, just tapping at the top right corner, there hiding a set-up key. Like on our PCs, there is also a task switcher on the upper-left for you to quickly get back to an already open application or close unneeded ones, that’s also mean the device have multi-tasking capabilities which you can running more than one application at once, practically it can handles even as many as 15 programs running in the background without noticeable lagging problem.

Telephony

Since Nokia N900 is a tablet and a phone, so we would like to talk a bit about the telephony. Normally you can make a call either in portrait or landscape mode. The phonebook is also pleasant to use. You can directly contact people on the list via messaging (whether it is email, instant message), voice call, or internet call. The phonebook also allows you to adds Skype, SIP, Gtalk accounts info. Call quality is pretty good, and it is totally have no differences with other handset.

Internet Browsing

Now come to the strongest part of N900. The device was integrated with Maemo browser based on the same technology as Mozilla Firefox with complete HTML,  Flash, Javascript and other  Web standard support. So practically there are no website that couldn’t loaded at N900.  Websites are showed just like you see on your computer and the browser also features visual history, automatic form-filling and Google Search, Multiple tabs that make convenient on browsing.  You have two way to zoom in or out on the browser. One is double tapping on a website element will zooms it in to fill the WVGA resolution of the display, double tap again will reveal the previous scene.  Another zoom option is making a circular motion clockwise, with the counter-clockwise gesture assigned to the zoom out function. The latter option is more tricky, need time to get use of it. Overall,  surfing the Web really feels pleasing: page load are quick, screen large, and powerful browser make the web navigation enjoyable.

Music and Video

The N900 has a pretty simple media player. You can browse music tracks by Artist, Songs, Genres or Playlists. However the player lack some feature that we familiar with such as auto generate playlist,  track recognition, and equalizers. The video palyback also is very straight forward. What is interesting about video player is that it can play DivX and XviD videos without needing a third party software! This is not something that will found on other Nokia’s handsets. The large screen of  800×480 pixels resolution and supports 16mln colors really helpful in watching video clips on the device. There is also TV-out (through the 3.5mm jack) supported,  so you can share your video clips with others on your TV.

Camera

Nokia N900 sport a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar optics and features autofocus, Dual LED flash. It can captures  maximal image resolution of 2576 x 1936 pixels. There are also pretty basic setting included such as focusing mode, white balance, exposure, ISO sensitivity and picture resolution. The pictures quality somehow is only acceptable,not up to other same range of camera. For video recording, it captured at resolution of 848×480 pixels, 22-24 frames per second. It is however is more simple than picture snapping setting, it is only white balance and exposure. it suffered lagging problem that affect the final capture result too, so the video quality is not something that you expected for.

Final Words

Maybe it is the new trend of combination of internet tablet and handset. In fact, some of the top smartphone also fall in this way. But they are handset at first and internet at next,  unlike this Nokia N900 first is an internet tablet, then is a handset. So in this differences you can tell that N900 has a better internet browsing feature then other smartphone, and vise versa. In the future, we believe these two characteristic can be merge very well. But for the moment, Nokia N900 is better be an internet tablet then a smartphone.