Huge User review: The N900 by Mikey

Over the last two weeks I have been lucky enough to have the Nokia N900 on loan from WomWorld. This device has seen quite a bit of hype recently so I was really pleased to have the opportunity to see what all the fuss was about, and guess what, it doesn’t disappoint!

Having been something of a Symbian fanatic for the last nine years or so, I was eager to see if this new operating system could satisfy my needs, both in day to day usage and when the mood takes me for a spot of tinkering under the hood.

I’m not going to give you a mile long spec sheet, show you a pile of photos taken by its average camera, or tell you why I think it is better than the iPhone, you can read a million and one reviews that already do that, I’m simply going to tell you my perception of this device and operating system, for the average Symbian freak and I’ll be comparing it to my N97 and N95, it would probably be better compared to the Samsung i8910HD but I’ve never used one so.. My main concerns were that the N900 is pitched as “not ready for the general public” and “only for the tech savvy geeks out there”, even though I now know my way around the internals of a Symbian phone, remember that I’ve spent nine years playing about with it. Would the N900 be too confusing to get suck in and mod, or would it be a dream come true, an open source OS that could be tweaked to my heart’s content. I will tell you...

So, the door knocked, I ripped open the package and fired her up. Firstly, she’s heavy, but not uncomfortable to hold, maybe because I was already used to the N97, which itself is quite a heavy bulky phone, but with the N900 the weight feels good, it makes it feel solid, it doesn’t creak and I even though its plastic it didn’t feel cheap, the back cover is thick and quite hard to remove, which is good, except for Nokia's annoying trait of hiding the SD card slot underneath making a seemingly hot swappable card a pain in the arse to take out. Overall she felt well built and I got the impression I was holding a proper tool, a mobile computer and not a phone.

Opening the slider to reveal the keyboard didn’t give the same satisfying clunk that the N97 gives, but the mechanism is also nice and solid and I actually preferred the flat viewing angle when typing compared to the N97. The keyboard wasn’t as enjoyable to use as the one on the N97 though, the keys were too close together, they gave much better feedback but the top row is way too close to the edge of the screen, it is more functional, and I prefer the layout, but it just didn’t have as nice a feel to it. But after a while you can get used to any keyboard, and I enjoyed the pc like shortcuts like backspace to go back a page in the web browser and having a Ctrl key.

One problem I came across, that really bugged the hell out of me, was the position of the usb/charger port on the side of the keyboard. When plugged in it is really hard to get a comfortable grip on the device to type, actually it’s almost impossible to type and it was really annoying having to unplug it from the charger every time I wanted to make a post or something.

The screen of this little beast is lovely and crisp, 800x480 resolution is fantastic on a mobile device, its colourful and sharp, but I couldn’t help feeling that the actual screen size should be bigger, there really isn’t much point in zooming in on web pages most of the time as text is easily readable and it is very sensitive to touch, I didn’t have to use the stylus at all and it was easy to click the smallest of links accurately, for a resistive display I was very impressed at the sensitivity.

Battery life was one issue I was concerned about before having the device, but with moderate usage, and using 2g the device kept going for a full day, even with a few hours of browsing the net, it still powered on, which was totally acceptable for me as I always charge up every night when I go to bed,

I found reception on the n900 to be surprisingly good, much better than my n97 and it even beat my n95. When I’m in work I get terrible reception with T-Mobile, with the n97, I just get a loop of connecting and disconnecting, text messages don’t get through until I get a pile of them hours to late, with the n95 and n900 I get one bar of signal, but the crazy thing with the n900 was that with one bar, calls were still clear, texts always seemed to come through on time and I could still browse full web pages, admittedly a little slow but my n95 with one bar has a hard time with pages compressed to a few kb with opera mini so I was really shocked and very happy.

The camera sports the usual high class, but getting old 5mp Carl Zeiss lens with a dual LED flash. Seeing that it’s not intended to be an imaging device, it takes wonderful, highly detailed shots by day, but performs poorly by night. I’m not grumbling, it takes pictures no better or worse than my N95 or N97 but I would like to have seen some improvement over my ageing N95 from this brand new device.

Snapping and processing pictures took about 3 or 4 seconds, which is more than acceptable and has some options for pre and post editing, not many but enough, more importantly it works well, with my other Nokia phones I always get the feeling that something will go wrong, the phone will crash or people are standing there with strained smiles on their faces while I say hold on hold on it’ll take a shot now hold on haha. Not with the N900, it performed well every time and earned my trust quickly. It didn’t let me down once thinking about it, even when showing how it could take a picture while I had ten apps open in the background over TV out, it just did what it always did it really is very stable.

Video recording was also a pleasant experience and the video quality is great, with the double LED’s you can also film in the dark which is a nice touch, but again it’s all a little bit average when compared to most Series phones of the last couple of years.

The external speakers where a welcome improvement over the ones in my N97, still not as loud or deep as my N95 but more than satisfactory, and I can imagine that they would probably have more to give if or when an equalizer is added to the operating system.

Also present is an infrared port which is a welcome surprise that I thought I wouldn’t see on a Nokia phone again. Anyway enough of all that.

Basic Usage:

After so long with Symbian being my mobile platform of choice, I was a little worried that I wouldn’t gel with Maemo, that it wouldn’t satisfy me in the same ways that series60 has. With everything I’ve read making it out to be only for the tech savvy out there, I was really shocked at how easy it was to use and how intuitive the user interface was.

Within twenty minutes of opening the box, I’d synced my contacts with my n95, set up my email and instant messaging accounts set up access points, added repositories to the app manager, installed some apps and even upgraded the firmware. To do all of that on a Symbian phone would take a whole day to learn, and possibly a month to get right.

I think they have hit the nail on the head with the layout and feel here, there is nothing that I would change about it, but it does need some refinement. The transition effects are choppy half the time and need to be smoother, and some applications such as email are slow to open while others open in a split second, everything needs to even out a bit, but these are just optimizations that will be/are being sorted out with firmware updates.

Being that the area of the device that acts as your phone is supposed to be an add-on so to speak, I was surprised at the integration and even though quite a bit of functionality is missing it all worked great. I’m not a big talker and I don’t have 2000 contacts that I need to manage, I probably use the “phone features” of my phone less than any other feature, so it was enough for me.

With everything being so easy to set up and get the hang of I thought I was going to get bored quickly, until I took a better look at the app manager and got stuck in, I have to say that I think the n900 has got the best implementation of an app manager I’ve ever seen on a phone or pc. It truly rocks, add the addresses of the different repositories and all the apps show up in categories for you to browse and download at your leisure, all free, all open source, and contrary to belief, there are quite a few out there. And the thing I liked best is as well as standalone apps, the Maemo community is also adding functionality to the OS and core apps too, the app manager also looks for updates for your installed apps automatically, it’s all unbelievably simple. I really don’t think they will make much money out of the Ovi Store for Maemo since the app manager has everything covered so much better.

Home screens

One of the best things about this device is that it has four totally customizable home screens, this comes as a breath of fresh air to me, they just didn’t get it right with the n97, with the n900 they are exactly what I’ve always wanted.

These are my home screens

• Click to open image! Click to open image!
• Click to open image! Click to open image!
• Click to open image! Click to open image!
• Click to open image! Click to open image!
•  

You can add a different wallpaper to each home screen or you can create or download image sets which basically consist of a panoramic picture that spans the four screens, and there are plenty of widgets available for download, even after two weeks I was still hooked on playing around with the home screens they are really addictive.

The Task Manager

This is another great feature of the device and its placement between the home screens and the applications menu at first seemed a little odd, but you soon find that this concept really works, it keeps your open tasks to within two quick clicks away from anywhere in the OS, it also doubles up as a notification area for missed calls, emails and text messages. It becomes very practical and central to the way you use the device, it’s great to see so many new concepts on one device that actually work and seem well thought out.

The Conversation app.

This is another step in the right direction from Nokia, threaded messaging is something I have sorely missed on series 60 5th edition since their beta conversation app was only available on 3rd edition, so it was a pleasure to finally use a Nokia with a fully integrated threaded messaging app, and with the ability to add instant messaging accounts it becomes as easy to write an IM as it is to text, and it works well, what I really liked is that I could change my availability for my IM accounts from the taskbar on the home screen, as well as whether to share my location.

Clicking on a contact brings up all the different ways that you can contact them, be it SMS, email, Skype, windows live messenger or whatever other social network you use, it could not be simpler to continue your connected lifestyle while on the move and it’s another thumbs up from me for this app.

The Default Web Browser

What can I say, we know it’s based on Mozilla technology and has full Flash support, but does it actually stand out from the mobile browsers we are accustomed to on our Symbian phones.
Yes and no, at first I was blown away, visiting my Facebook homepage on their full site and it loading in a couple of seconds and being able to scroll around smoothly instantly, that was over Wi-Fi, I was even more impressed when it only took a few more seconds to load over 3g, with this device you really do get to take the full internet with you wherever you go.

Page rendering looks great and as you would see it on a pc monitor, and even though the display is so small with such high resolution, the tiniest of links are easily clickable without having to zoom in most of the time,

Making the circular motion on the screen and using the volume buttons to zoom in and out felt a bit cumbersome, but double tapping on an area to zoom in on it worked beautifully

The Flash support needs some work though, short videos on YouTube played fine but longer videos were choppy and full of dropped frames, videos from other sites often didn’t play well at all either, to me it felt like there was a problem caching the videos but hey I’m no programmer so don’t take my word for it lol.

The bookmarks page is a nice touch with thumbnails of the web sites, and they ability to put those thumbnails as bookmark shortcuts on your home screens is really cool, but what is Nokia's problem with putting a page back button on the screen, the history list that you are forced to use if the keyboard is closed is painfully slow, and over animated, they always do this with their browsers, when will they understand that nobody cares about the history list they want fast and easy access to the page they just left. At least with the keyboard open using the backspace key does just that but I’d like to see the last page cached rather than having to wait for it to reload.

It is by far the best default browser that Nokia have ever produced, but I still missed opera mini, even though it doesn’t give you the FULL web experience the speed that you can navigate the internet more than compensates and its massive server side compression is something I want on my n900 for those “one signal bar” situations.

There are other browsers available so at least there is some choice but even though it needs some refinement I was more than happy using the default browser for the whole two weeks.

The Media Player

What can I tell you, it’s simple, it looks great, and it does what it’s supposed to do flawlessly. Again there is missing functionality like not having an equalizer but the music sounds crisp and rich so I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would. Flicking through the album art looks and feels great, and playing music in the background doesn’t impact on the speed and stability of the device. One thing that I did find a bother thought was that the only way to control the music when you are not in the music app is the widget for the home screen.

Having no media control on my headphones meant that the n900 fell short in the department of acting as my mp3 player while out and about. Although media controls on Bluetooth headphones do work, I much prefer wired sets and hope that Nokia sort this out soon.

Video playback on the n900 is superb, playing unconverted AVI’s, streamed straight from my pc over TV out, I could hardly tell the difference from the same film burned to DVD. I didn’t run into much that the n900 wouldn’t play, and the media streaming is quick and pain free. The video player could also use some added functionality but it works so well I can’t complain about it.

Compared to the other core apps the photos application is not as polished, it still needs some work to get it up to standard if you ask me, scrolling through the images is choppy, and it is probably the most un-intuitive part of the entire operating system, that being said large pictures load fast and look awesome on such a high resolution display.

Now on to my favourite pastime

Modding

I found Maemo 5 so intuitive and easy to navigate that id soon played with every feature, it was time to dig a little deeper, having never used a terminal in my life, I was pretty confused and had no confidence, since through the terminal you can really screw up the device just by misspelling a command, so I tended to use it as little as I could get away with, until I actually know what I’m doing in there.

And browsing the major Maemo community websites was also just as confusing, scratching my head reading about technical jargon that I didn’t understand one bit, I felt like a complete noob again. But I battled on, gained root access to the device and familiarized myself with the Midnight Commander programme, and within a few days I was searching through the system files as I would on a Symbian phone, id still prefer to use an Xplore like app but Midnight Commander is actually more powerful and feature rich so I have no complaints about access to the system.

The n900 is made for tweakers, geeks and modders there is no doubt about that, nothing beats an open source operating system on a phone it’s unbelievable, there is just so much that can be done, from the programmers integrating new features into the OS without you having to wait for firmware updates, to the simple modder who just wants to customize the appearance,

Many of the customisations that we spent years building to in Symbian have mostly been taken care of in the first few months of the n900s release.

So much can be edited, changing boot screens, custom icons, changing system sounds, changing the operator logo, changing almost any part of the taskbar to make it your own as well as the position, playing with transition effects and many other things, I just can’t imagine what can be achieved with this platform in say a year or so before Maemo 6 is released. It really does keep your attention day after day, there is just always something new to do.

The device itself takes me back to the days when the n95 took the best of the day, and wrapped it up in to one package, that’s the kind of feeling I get I get with the n900, that I have some raw computing power in my pocket, it feels more like a tool for keeping you connected than any other phone I’ve used, I don’t know what issues it had when it was released but after the few firmware updates that it has seen since it came out it is as solid as a rock, I experienced only one crash in the whole two weeks, and that was with me pushing it too the limits every day. With my n97 I was afraid to show people a video, or take a photo, or even just show someone a photo, because something would always go wrong and id end up looking like a fool and id actually end up making excuses for why it didn’t work, the n900 never failed or let me down, I trusted it to do its job and I was happy to make it do some work in front of others.

Showing off how it could display a 2 GB AVI in fantastic quality, while having the web, Bounce Evolution and five or six other apps all happily sitting there in the background without any noticeable slowdown of the device left my friends very envious.

So to conclude.

Overall I am completely happy and impressed with the n900, don’t get me wrong there is room for improvement, functionality needs to be added to most of the core applications, transition effects need to be smoother and more stable and the user interface in general needs a little more tightening up to make the whole experience more fluid, I suppose I should mention portrait mode but to be honest I didn’t miss it, but I can see the benefit of having it in at least some of the main applications like conversation, internet browser and email. And I also must just have a little tiny rant about the usb port which stops you being able to hold the device in a suitable typing position when the lead is plugged in, the lock switch which is on the bottom of the phone, I can see them saying it’s on the side because it’s a landscape orientated device but when you are pulling it out of your pocket the lock switch definitely feels like it’s in a stupid place and the volume buttons which I found way too hard to press and had no feedback in them at all to tell you if they had been pressed. There, rant over lol

On the upside I love the overall web experience of the default browser, along with the conversation app and handling of instant messaging accounts, its multitasking capabilities and the fresh simplistic look and feel of the user interface, the fact that it never let me down and continued to interest me day after day, the app manager with its catalogues of applications to download or even get involved in their development.

It left me absolutely gutted that I had to give it back, can it handle everything my daily needs ask of a phone, yes, and it does a great job of it. Can it satisfy my need to look under the hood and fiddle with the nuts and bolts, yes, beyond my wildest dreams? And can it tempt me to switch, at least for the time being, from Symbian to Maemo, YES.

Apologies if there is anything I have missed out or messed up on haha this is my first review, Mikey

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