The Nokia N900 has finally been officially announced, slated for release in October 2009 with a price tag that might surprise you.
Review summary of the Nokia N900:
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 The Nokia N900 is decidedly not a smartphone; it's more a tiny computer running an advanced Linux operating system. To that end, if you're looking for the most advanced, feature rich smartphone that Nokia makes, you'll be disappointed with the incomplete experience that the Nokia N900 offers, and the lack of available support and downloadable options available at launch. Even though the Maemo operating system offers a polished, beautiful touch-friendly experience, most smartphone fans will be better served by one of Nokia's Symbian OS devices, like the Nokia N86 or Nokia E72, which offer a more complete package for calling, navigation, messaging and business apps. But if you want a glimpse at the future of portable devices, you might find the Nokia N900 fascinating. The Web browser is the best in the mobile game, capable of loading real, desktop-class Flash content and playing streaming videos inline on Web sites like YouTube and Hulu. Performance doesn't live up to the hype, and most videos stutter along, but the capability is there if you have the patience to wait. The camera is Nokia-good, a solid 5-megapixel shooter. Plus, for calling, there are interesting options like Skype and Google Talk clients integrated into the phone app. Setup can be counterintuitive and difficult, sometimes buggy and unreliable, and definitely not for novice users. The keyboard and the external design are also utterly disappointing, especially for a flagship Internet device. But if you want a peek at the future of mobile operating systems, the Nokia N900 fits the bill, and future upgrades with more developer support should offer an extensible, refined experience for early adopters. Release: November 2009. Price: $560.
Pros: Best Web browser on any mobile device. Great camera took high quality images. Linux-based Maemo OS is ultimately extensible.
Cons: Incomplete smartphone experience, lacks basic features. Ovi Maps is buggy and sub-par navigation experience. Online stores lack application support . . . for now.
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Full Nokia N900 Review:
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If you were disappointed by the underpowered Nokia N97, it may be worth waiting until October for the Nokia N900 in stead. Put simply, Nokia's new N900 boasts technology that is worthy of a high-end smartphone today combined with software for the future.
The Nokia N900 will come equipped with a slide-out QWERTY thumbboard, Quad-band GSM network support, 10/2 Mbps HSPA connectivity (with T-Mobile USA support) as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 support. Limited RAM has been an issue on the previous generation of Maemo based tablets, but the Nokia N900 will offer 256 MB RAM plus 768 MB virtual memory. This will especially be crucial for the desktop-grade, Mozilla based browser to deliver the goods as promised. The Nokia N900 is also powered by an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and 3D graphics acceleration with support for OpenGL ES 2.0.
The Nokia N900's 3.5-inch WVGA display is of the resistive touchscreen kind, meaning that it responds both to finger and stylus navigation. A complete overview of the Nokia N900's capabilities can be found here, revealing that Widgets will just be a small part of the package. Our hope is that Maemo 5 (check out videos of Maemo 5 here) and the N900 will silence the Widget craze to some extent, and that developers will be encouraged to develop real applications again.
In addition to the new Mozilla based browser, the Nokia N900 will offer a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash. The camera should also be capable of recording WVGA video, while a front-faced camera will act as a VGA web camera. The smartphone will also be capable of video and audio playback, and offers up to 32GB of internal storage as well as a microSD memory slot capable of holding 16GB cards. A 3.5mm headphone jack has also been incorporated.
The Nokia N900 will be available in November 2009 with the healthy price tag of 500 EUR before taxes and carrier subsidies. Although the phone supports T-Mobile USA's 3G network at 1700 MHz, it's not yet known whether T-Mobile will actually start selling this phone in the U.S. In the last couple of months, several unlocked phones have been announced with this capability, and we doubt T-Mobile is planning to pick them all up, if any.
Price and availability
The Nokia N900 is available unlocked online from Nokia and other retailers, like Amazon.com, for around $560.
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