Syntactic sugar

Nokia N900

Yay! Got my N900 directly from Nokia yesterday and I’ve been playing with it a lot. Overall I’m very happy with this new phone, finally something that beats the Nokia E90.

My findings for now;

Hardware
It’s a lot smaller than I expected, ok.. I was used to a E90 which is a huge brick (or my “mobile fridge” as I used to call it). It feels well constructed and solid; no creaky sounds when you squeeze it. The keyboard is a bit too small IMHO, but again; I was used to the keyboard of the E90 which is pretty large. The keyboard sliding-mechanism feels stirdy and will probably survive the phone.
The touchscreen has a very soft feel, probably not very scratch-proof (I ordered a 3M Vikuiti DQC-160 screenprotector rightaway). Touch-response is good, though I do need the stylus for browsing, clicking a link with my fingers is practically impossible without zooming in.
The speakers are quite good, though not as loud as the E90, but it has a surprisingly good stereo-sound with a large range. The headphones are also pretty good, have a lot of bass, but I’ll keep using my Sony MDR-E888’s for a while.

Software
It’s clearly a phone for geeks; Maemo is very stable, pretty fast, but there are some things a ‘regular’ phone-user will miss. Don’t get me wrong; almost everything works, but there are some issues I came across;

• The email-client; IMAP is supported, but my IMAP-account is filled with a lot of folders and emails (from over 7 years worth of business-email) and you can’t unsubscribe IMAP folders. The N900 checks them all and this take a lot of time and processor-usage (which will eventually drain the battery). After a while the mail-client just refused to open the Inbox-folder. According to this bugreport this will be fixed in Nokia’s next update. There’s a workaround; you can use Nokia Messaging, in which you can select the IMAP-folder which need to be synced. Also there’s no support for IMAP-Idle.. which kinda sucks.
• No MMS-support unfortunately. Maybe this will be implemented in a while.
• Almost all apps have to be used in landscape mode; only the Phone-application switches. This is supposed to be fixed in next update (though I’m not sure about that)
• “only” 256 mb storage available in the root-filesystem; though Nokia fixed this by creating a 2GB Ext3-filesystem and mounted this in /home/opt there are a lot of app’s out there that are not ‘optified’ and use the root-filesystem. This shouldn’t be a problem if you only use the repositories from Nokia and Maemo Extras, but if you’re using Extras-testing and Extras-Devel you’re filling up the root-filesystem.. Which I found out the hard way .. Also most third-party apps are not optified, eg. Mozilla Fennec which takes roughly 35 mb of storage.  I’ll be trying some other file-system layouts later, after making backups
• Nokia Maps is verrrry slow and uses a lot of processor. There’s no guided navigation available yet.. Sygic announced they will ship their navigation software at the end of 2009 .. I’d also like Google Maps for the N900, but there’s still no support for it (yet?).
• I still haven’t found a way to select multiple files/messages (yet), mainly in the file-browser or in the mail-client.  If you want to remove multiple messages or move/delete multiple files this is annoying, you have to move/delete each file/message individually. Any tips on this are greatly appreciated.
  Update 09-12-09: selecting multiple files/email is supported, just click “delete” in the email-app and select the emails you’d like to delete, same goes for file-management..
• Battery-life is kinda bad.. depends on what widgets and programs you’re running. I think I have to order a desktop-charger and some extra batteries soon.

The good things about the N900:

• IM Integration: Skype, Gtalk, MSN, ICQ are integrated into the Contacts-app, which is very cool IMHO. You just select a contact and you’re able to choose; message using SMS, any kind of IM (if they are online), email, call using cellular, skype or GTalk.. the works! This really makes the N900 a multipurpose communicator ..
• I wouldn’t use it; you can update the IM-status with your location, you can even choose which level of detail you’d like to expose: region, city or street.
• The browser is verrrrry good, very fast, renders everything, also Flash and just works like the browser you have on your computer. Only small thing ; bookmarks.. I didn’t find a usable bookmarks-manager. You can only create folders in bookmarks by adding a bookmark, not by editting (but maybe I missed something). I’ve tried Fennec also, but the default browser is much faster, uses less memory and has better controls.
• When connected using Wifi in my home-network the media-player and filebrowser automatically detected uPNP-shares from my Mac and my MediaTank.
• Finally a phone on which I can be ROOT! (without hacking/jailbreaking)
• Syncing Google Calendar works great with the Mail For Exchange-feature.. as long as you keep syncing of email and contacts disabled.
  Update 09-12-09 : Syncing Google Calendar worked great, but now it keeps telling me “Cannot connect to server” .. annoying!
• The FM-transmitter is very cool.. It even sends the text “Nokia” to RDS-enabled radios..
• I can use WAVE from my Mobile!!! w000t!

In general I’m very happy with the N900, mainly because everything that in my house that has a processor is running some kind of Unix/Linux-flavour. Maemo has a promising future and I can’t wait for the next update; not only for bugfixes, also because I’m very curious what new features will be added.

buTTon Nokia N900, linux Maemo, N900, Nokia