N900 First Impressions
Hooray - we have received the Nokia N900, the very first Maemo phone of the well known Finnish vendor. Read on for our first impressions.
The Good
Most importing difference to other Nokia top notch devices is the decent touch support on the N900. At last you can now drag anywhere without having to use the scrollbar (like on current Series 60 5th Edition devices). The scrollbar also fades away after scrolling.
There are several desktops that you can switch by dragging them horizontally - better than the Android ones that I have seen because you can actually go in a circle (so there is no most left or most right desktop).
Another cool usability feature is the absence of cancel buttons in almost all places, just tap outside of the dialog's area to cancel it. This sounds complex but feels very natural after a while.
The phone's contact list consists of two frames - on the right side you have shortcuts (0-9, ABC, DEF, etc) and on the left frame you see the contacts.
The browser is powerful (it's based on Mozilla) and even supports Flash out of the box, nice one.
On the hardware side I'm quite pleasantly surprised on the battery's long duration (take that Palm Pre 
). The keyboard is also quite decent with a small but surprisingly good to handle space bar. Also the high resolution is well received (800x480 pixel).
The Bad
There's bound to be shadow when there's light. First of all: when the phone starts for the first time it asks me for the current date, time and position. Hello, you can get all of this information from the network - please let me double check but don't bother me with this.
Even though dragging works everywhere, it's not really as a smooth experience like on Android or the iPhone. The UI clearly needs some more speed in that process.
You can only use the device in landscape mode - unless you're making a call, then it's the portrait mode. That's something I don't understand - why shouldn't the user be able to switch at any time? Also the contact list works differently in phone mode and in normal mode.
The device is quite bulky and heavy, but at the same it feels quite robust. Smaller would be better.
The phone's alarm clock is another subtle thing: when it goes off, you have two equally large buttons: one for snoozing, one for stopping. I want the snooze button to be simple and the stopping mechanism to be complex, otherwise I just hit stop by accident and go back to sleep unaware that I didn't hit snooze.
Icons... for the most part the Series 60 icons are being used. Some like their clean and simple appearance, some don't. I belong to the latter.
The software installation process is another somewhat annoying thing - the good part is the Maemo specific section within Ovi that's easy accessible from within the phone. Currently this is browser-based so when you want to install an application, the application manager is being launched (which pauses for a moment), then the installation process is started. When the installation is finished I remain in the application manager and need to manually exit it to return to the browser. What I want instead is an intelligent application based store: it should allow me to install apps directly (and provide me with an option to launch the app after installation), it should indicate me when I view software that is already installed, it should provide me an easy way to upgrade existing apps.
The Ugly
Zooming in the browser is somewhat fun at the first time but very annoying later onwards. You move your finger clockwise to zoom in and anti-clockwise to zoom out. At first the browser doesn't know of course that you want to zoom so the page is dragged in the first moments before the gesture is being recognized. Funnily enough this zooming gesture is only supported in the browser. Zooming into photos is not supported at all.
The screen of the N900 is attracting dust and fingerprints like no other touch enabled phone we have. Good thing Nokia provides a polishing cloth.
The WLAN handling requires bugfixing. If you have trouble connecting to websites (as we had), then go to the main menu > settings > Internet connections > connections. There you have to select your WLAN connection, press edit and then go forward until you see the 'Advanced' button. There you have to switch to the 'Other' tab and select another power saving mode. Simple enough for developers, but only very determined enduser will cope with that (14 clicks and one scroll action are required for this change).
The Coding
You can code for the N900 using QT, good ol' Linux or Widget programming. It's also possible to use Java SE programming, however support for that needs to be installed by the user first (and it's not a trivial process). There is also an overview about the state of Java on Maemo.
Start by visiting http://maemo.org/development. The SDK runs only on Ubuntu Linux, but there's a virtual machine for Mac OS X or Windows as well.
In comparison to Android the development tool chain needs to be simplified in our opinion, but it's a good start.
The Verdict
The N900 is a definitive step forward for Nokia, but it is still somewhat lagging behind Android and iPhone. Nokia, please pay attention to detail, consistency and even more usability in the next release. A sleeker hardware would also be welcomed for sure. And please allow 'normal' multitouch zooming in your browser (like the HTC Hero or the iPhone).
The Fun Part
Nokia has released... well... some strange advertisements, have a look for yourself:
Robert
December 3rd, 2009 - 15:05
I’m kind of surprised to read about the (pretty obvious) shortcomings you mentioned above. I was not expecting them, considering they all relate to features that have been properly implemented on other touchscreen devices for quite some time now.
Some of the issues, like the WiFi not working properly out-of-the box or the inconsistencies in usability (contact list working differently depending on which mode the phone is, zoom working only in the browser), are simply inexcusable for any brand-name phone, not to mention for a phone that costs as much as the N900 does. I understand not all WiFi networks/devices behave the same, and I understand users tend to use some features more in phone mode than they do in normal mode (and viceversa), but things like a fallback mode for the WiFi and a consistent, unified UI are critical for a device like the N900, especially one coming from Nokia. Perhaps a firmware update will fix them (hopefully soon) .
On the other hand, the device does seem to be capable of delivering a very interesting user experience, and it definitely has the potential of seeing some really cool apps in the future. So Nokia scores some points here.
Question: being Linux-based, how moddable is the phone? Can you install a different Linux distro on it? Can you mess around with the current distro?
December 3rd, 2009 - 15:37
To be fair the WLAN connectivity problem is only affecting some routers (its known for NetGear, but our Siemens and Arcor routers are also affected). Good thing about the N900 that a Terminal is delivered out of the box – and you have complete root access on that. So you can even install different Linux flavors (or any compatible OS that is). Root access is described here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Root_access
January 19th, 2011 - 00:37
Nicely written. Keep it up.