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Getting things in control

There are no controls on the Nokia N900 front panel, the only other functional element being the earpiece, the video-call camera and a couple of sensors on top.
The earpiece, the video-call camera and a couple of sensor are at the front

The top (if the handset is held in portrait mode that is) hosts one of the speakers along with the microUSB slot and the lanyard eyelet.

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The microUSB port is sandwiched between the lanyard eyelet and one of the loudspeakers on top

The other speaker is at the bottom, next to the lock slider, the 3.5mm audio jack and the microphone pinhole. The large and a bit cheapish looking stylus also goes in here.
It’s quite crowded at the bottom: stylus slot, microphone pinhole, screen-lock slider and the other speaker

The left side of Nokia N900 has no functional elements whatsoever.

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There’s not a lot going on at the left side of the handset

On the right you get the volume rocker, the power key and the camera button. The infrared port(!) is also here. A peculiar decision by Nokia is to give the users no manual control over it and leave it only for remote control applications and the likes.
Nokia N900 has a volume rocker, a power key and a camera key on the right

The back features the 5 megapixel camera and the dual LED flash. They are hidden under a small protective cover which should be more than enough to protect them from getting scratched.

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The back of Nokia N900

There’s also a kickstand here, which can be extended to make it possible to lay the phone on a desk or a table at an angle suitable for watching video. A small magnet takes care of retracting the stand when you are done using it.
The kickstand can come in handy for watching videos

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Finally, we come to one of the most important parts of the Nokia N900 hardware – the slide-out QWERTY keyboard. As we mentioned the handset doesn’t slide out too much which has left less space for the keys.
Three-row QWERTY keyboard slides out

Nokia chose (or were forced to use depending on how you look at it) a three-row layout which means that virtually every key has two and some have three symbols. So you will need to do a lot of work with the Alt and Shift keys, that’s for sure. It’s good there is a virtual on-screen dialing pad so you don’t have to make your calls using the QWERTY one.

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The keys themselves are pretty cool to type on. The tactile feedback and movement are so nicely done that you can achieve pretty great speed. However the limited space means smaller keys will less spacing between them so users with extremely large hands should probably check it out hands-on before handing out the cash.

How comfortable did we feel with it? Well, let’s just mention that half the software part of this preview was written on the handset itself. It’s that good.
Nokia N900 handles nicely

So that’s that with the hardware for now, let’s take a peek inside the beast. That Maemo OS certainly looked nice on those screenshot but what about its real-life performance. Join us on the next page to find out.

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Maemo user interface

The first thing that you’ll notice about the Maemo OS is that unlike most other smartphone OSes out there it is only works in landscape mode. The telephony and the Blocks game are the only parts of the UI that can work in portrait mode. The good news is that Nokia are already working on a firmware upgrade that should enable portrait mode throughout the interface. It should be coming to the market before the end of the year and we’ll do everything we can to update our review once it becomes available.

Now about the actual user experience. Maemo 5.0 is organized in three levels rather than two. The extra step added between the homescreen and the main menu is reserved for the task manager and it’s skipped if there are no applications running in background. What that means is the only way to open the main menu from the homescreen is to open up the Task manager first and then hit the menu shortcut.

We certainly get the logic behind that solution as you always have your open applications at hand. And it’s not only different applications that go there – the browser windows are listed there as well for easy tab switching. Perhaps the developers were afraid that the applications, which always stay open, will fill up the available memory quite soon so they preferred to remind you of them every time you reach for the main menu to start a new application. Yet somehow we feel that giving the user the options for opening the main menu and the task manager separately would have been quite wiser – it certainly makes more sense for the advanced user.

The homescreen consists of four side-scrollable screens that are at your disposal to be filled with widgets. Tapping at the top right corner brings up the set-up key and upon pressing it you get to rearrange the widgets and add new ones as you please. You can even disable some of the screens to make the rotation quicker.

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The Nokia N900 homescreen: scroll sideways for more

The task switcher displays thumbnails of your running apps so you can reopen one at the expense of a single click. Additionally you can close an application by simply pressing the top right corner of its thumbnail.
There’s a pretty cool looking task manager sitting between the homescreen and the main menu

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The main menu has two-tier structure unlike the flat menus that seem to be the trend nowadays. That means that you need to make an extra step to reach for the applications that Nokia deemed not important enough to sit on the main screen. Those sit in a scrollable list under the “More…” icon. That’s another thing we found to be a bugger at times. We couldn’t find an option for manual rearranging of the menu items either.
The two-tier main menu

If you have been keeping track you would find many of the icons familiar – they are the same as in Nokia’s latest S60 smartphones. The Nokia N900 also packs the kinetic scrolling that has been making its way to those devices (admittedly at a slower pace than what we users would have liked).

Exiting the main menu or going back a step is done by clicking somewhere outside the icons. This gets most people pretty confused at first but it’s actually pretty comfortable once you get the hang of it. No need to reach for this or that corner – just press next to an icon and you are out.

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On the downside if you didn’t aim accurately for an icon the unpleasant result might be exiting the menu altogether.

Finally, we would like to mention a few things about the graphics and the performance. The Nokia N900 offers a decent amount of eye-candy with the apps getting blurry when a dialog pops-up and the wallpaper goes out of focus much the same way when you open the menu.

Also the homescreen behaves in a way similar to the Android handsets where the icons and the wallpaper move at different speeds to simulate great distance between them. It’s not as flashy and shiny ala Samsung Jet but it’s not too bad either.

The best part is that the Nokia N900 runs pretty smoothly with no lags or hold-ups. There is some waiting when opening data-intensive applications like Ovi Maps but the rest open in an instant. We’ll have to see if that good first impression stands when we are done with the in-depth review, of course.

Web browser in the focus

The web browser of Nokia N900 is certainly the best part of its software equipment. The Mozilla-based application gives a new meaning to the term desktop-like browsing. It sports the same rendering algorithm as what seems to be the favorite desktop browser around the office so the fact that every website renders perfectly goes without saying.

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The Mozilla-based browser is extremely impressive

There is visual history, automatic form-filling and Google Search shortcut for maximum convenience. Double-tapping on a website element zooms it in to fill the WVGA resolution of the display. Another double tap and you are back at where you started. Panning and zooming is really fast and accurate.
Fullscreen mode

Nokia have also came up with another zooming method for the N900 – you can make a spiral gesture with you finger. You simply start the spiral with a movement to the right side for zooming in and to the left for zooming out. However we find that a bit too slow to be actually useful. You need to make four or five circles instead of two short taps. And there isn’t auto-alignment when you use that gesture zooming.

Finally, we would like to mention one of the most important features of the browser – its Flash support. Nokia N900 comes with full Adobe 9.4 Flash and not the Flash Lite that most other handets support. We have never seen a handset handle flash content as smoothly and quickly as the N900. If the web sites you browse have a lot of Flash elements you should definetely check out the Nokia N900 when looking for your next handset.

The camera has Carl Zeiss written all over

No, we’re kidding, of course. The Carl Zeiss lens certification is hardly the most important aspect of the camera, but name dropping always makes for an eye-grabbing title. The Nokia N900 comes with a 5 megapixel camera with a maximal image resolution of 2576 x 1936 pixels.

We rarely get excited about 5 megapixel cameras any more as we’ve seen more of those that we can remember, but we were curious about that one, as it’s got a brand new interface that comes with the new OS.

As it turned out the available settings are extremely limited – white balance, ISO sensitivity, flash mode and exposure compensation is all you get. There are also dedicated portrait, macro, landscape and sports modes and two different image sizes (5 and 3 MP).
The simple camera interface

When full 5 MP resolution is selected the viewfinder occupies only the central part of the display, to compensate for the differnt aspect ratios of the screen and the camera sensor.

We are not going to get in details about the Nokia N900 image quality just yet. We prefer to wait a little longer and take some more photos so we’ll leave it for the full review that should be out next week. For now we’ll just post several samples for you to enjoy.
Nokia N900 camera samples

And here goes a sample video in WVGA (848 x 480 pixels) resolution at 24fps from the Nokia N900 camera.

Final words

The Nokia N900 certainly is an impressive little fella (well not that little actually). It’s so different from anything else we have reviewed so far that it constantly keeps us on our toes. And we like being kept tip-toeing by new gadgets. It’s certainly our thing.

Luckily, most of the surprises that came with this blend between a phone and an ultra portable tablet are of the nice type. We are pretty confident that it has even more to keep us happy, but we will have to wait until the review is completed to see that out.

What we have to mention though is that the Nokia N900 certainly is anything but a mainstream device and it will appeal to a limited audience. There are shinier options out there that will give you more eye-candy and better multimedia capabilities for less money. But if web browsing and messaging are essential to you than this might be your winner.