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Owning the Nokia N900 for a couple of days now, I will summarize my first impressions in this blag post. Before I start I will tell you where I am coming from phone wise and will base my review on that.

I have had the Nokia e61i for quite a while, but it has only been little more than half a year that I have had a phone rate with a reasonable data plan which allowed me to use the interwebs on my phone.

What I liked about the e61i:

• Battery life was awsome.
• General sturdyness. The phone has taken quite a beating and stood up to it pretty well.
• The keyboard. The tactile feel of the keyboard and the way this phone fit into my hands made writing emails, SMS or IRC messages a charm.
• Sound quality and reception was ok.
• Multitasking. I frequently surfed the webs while hanging out on IRC through puTTY and irssi in a screen session.
• iSyncing my address book and calendars worked reasonably well.
• The looks. Reminded me of an old HP calculator. Nice.

What I disliked about the e61i:

• Sloooow. It would take up to a minute to start Opera or Google maps.
• Lack of GPS.
• The keyboard. While the tactile aspect was good, the lettering of the keys was sub par.
• The proprietary connector. I can not emphasize this enough. If I had a stick and the responsible product manager in front of me…
• Each internet app would ask whether it was allowed to use the net and you’d have to click through a couple of dialogues every time.
• Media player sucks

Generally I liked the e61i so much, that I seriously considered buying its recent e-Series sibling, the e72. That phone seems to have addressed most, if not all, of the issues I had with the e61i. But then I thought that if I am shelling out 300 Euros, I might as well spend 500 and go for the new hottness.

Enter the Nokia N900.

Avalability was so bad that I had to cancel two orders in a row, because the retailers had been promised deliveries, but then the suppliers could not deliver. I also considered buying it from Amazon UK and go for the UK-keyboard. It looks like Vodaphone had given out this phone for contract renewals and a couple of people sold theirs for attractive prices on Amazon. But somehow I was worried about buying from a private person in a foreign country,… warranty, delivery and such. At last I bought it from Amazon Germany without express delivery (saved 13€) and received the package the next day. I don’t like Amazon for different reasons, but their service is prime.

The hardware

You don’t buy this phone for its design. Period. It is not ugly, but it certainly is not slick, mundane or stylish. Comparing it with the iPhone might be like comparing the MacBook Pro with a Thinkpad. Comparing it with the e61i is like comparing a Dragonfly with a cockroach. The N900 is reasonably well built, but it feels much more precious and fragile than my sturdy old companion.

Of course I dropped it right away on the first day and nothing happened. Not even a scratch, but that is something I don’t intend to do more often.

Buttons and connectors

The e61i had all the knobs I ever used facing front. I never cared for the volume buttons on the left side and there was nothing else on the sides of the device. The N900 has knobs and holes on three sides. Felt weird at first and still does.

Over time I have developed a passionate hate for proprietary connectors. The headphones for the e61i cost me 45 Euros and by the time I wanted to use them more often one channel would constantly drop. That sucked. And bad.

The N900 has the now new official standard micro USB and a 3.5mm headphone socket. Finally the phone industry listened to reason (Or pressure from the EU). I always imagined dedicated connector and socket designers sitting there, actually getting paid for designing the next socket menace. Yarr! These times are over!

The keyboard

Having played around with a couple of iPhones at work, I was not very impressed by the screen keyboard and was looking forward to the keyboard of the N900, which conveniently slides out with a satisfying *shnik*. The keys have a nice haptic touch and the labeling is much better than that of the e61i. But somehow the form factor and the lack of four directional keys on the german keyboard made me almost drop the phone a couple of times. Pressing the blue function key which is located on the far left side is surprisingly inconvenient. I have not had any problems with the top row of the keyboard being too close to the bottom ridge of the display, as others have reported, but somehow this blue arrow key bugs me. Maybe I’ll remap the keys to the UK/US layout once I figure out how to do that.

Apart from that the keys are really nice and I have not even figured out how to activate the screen keyboard yet. I’ll go with the slide out hardware keyboard.

The screen

The screen is a pure beauty. When its brightness is set to four of five, I think it is a tiny bit too dark, but on highest brightness it really shines. Literally. The resolution is incredible and allows for reading ridiculously small font sizes. Absolutely no comparison to the screen of the e61i. The uniformity of the brightness is a wee bit uneven on the very far right of the screen, which is only noticable on blank white pages. But that is okay, I won’t complain.

Yes, the screen is fit for watching a movie, when travelling. Of course this sort of depends on the movie, the Navii will look like smurfs, but it’ll be an ok experience for the bulk of non-landscapy movies and it will surely more than suffice for your daily dose of geekbrief.tv or hot for words.

The touchscreen is very responsive. The touchscreen of an iPhone admittedly is even silkier, but actually I find myself whipping out and using the stylus quite a lot, for it is much more accurate when playing Gweled and it leaves no fatty fingerprints on the screen. The capacitive screen of the iPhone can not be used with a stylus and if I were given the chance to choose, I’d pick the one that is built in.

I did the touchscreen test with the pre installed sketch application and found good results. Well, with a resistive screen you have to apply at least some pressure, which means you can not do the ‘only slight touch’ test described there. But at least there is no wiggle waggle on the screen. I am uncertain whether this is of any significance, since the original article is about capacitive touchscreens. Maybe doing this test with resistive screens is rubbish. But then again, if you get up close to the picture and stare at the grid for a while, you can notice white spots at the intersections of the lines. Tataaa, optical illusion for free.

Sound

The two speakers are located on the left and right side of the device and it is astonishing what kind of sound quality is possible with such small speakers. Of course no one can expect any serious bass from this size, but is really ok for listening to some music or watching films or clips. In a direct sound comparison with an iPhone I could not find much of a difference. I am not sure whether the iPhone has stereo, the N900 does.

The headphones that come with the phone do deliver the bass which is lacking with the speakers. Sound is rich and voluminous with maybe a tiny bit too much emphasis on the bass. There is no equalizer (yet) and I can more than happily live with this. The headphone quality is clearly above my expectation. Maybe high end music freaks will complain. I don’t. On the contrary.

Speech sound quality is different from what I was familiar with on the e61i. I can not yet put my finger on it, but it really does sound different. The other person somehow sounds to be a bit further away. Not on the other side of the room, but maybe a meter or two away. On the e61i, the other one would be sitting right in your ear. I think I’ll get used to it, since the sound quality is definitely not bad, only different.

FM-Radio transmitter

Surprisingly I love this feature. I just had a perfect moment in the bath tub, with the plants surrounding me and the piranhas (gold fish) in the aquarium right next to the tub, candle light and Groove Salad received via Wifi and sent to the car stereo system which is built into the wall of our bathroom. Great!

The FM transmitter also allows me to torture my friend with my quirky taste of music when we are heading downtown in his car. This feature works really well and is easy to handle. Well done Nokia!

I absolutely don’t care for the FM receiver that I know is also possible with additional software, since I hate normal radio and I prefer internet radio stations. I have not yet tried how good internet radio will work over 3G. We’ll see.

Camera

I have had an Olympus mju camera, which was really ok, but I gave it away to friends, who are taking much more pictures than I did. I never really took the camera with me, except when travelling. Now with the N900 I’ll always have a reasonably good camera with me.

The CCD has a noticable color noise which you can see when you examine the white wall on the left side of the picture. The N900 of a friend showed similar colored noise, thus I think this is the normal picture quality we can expect from the device. The quality is by far good enough for me and far better than the picture quality of the 2 megapixel camera of the e61i.

I like the mechanical cover you have to slide away to activate the camera. The software is simple and intuitive. I have no idea why the music stops when you activate the camera, but hey. The camera has two led flashes which is two more than the e61i had.

GPS

I have not really used the GPS and the maps application apart from an ‘okay, there I am on the map’ test. The e61i does not have a GPS built in, but it did a pretty good job pinpointing your location by the cell you are logged into. The only occasion when this failed on me was when I was on the countryside on the fields with roads that had no namesigns. I guess there the N900 will do a much better job for me. If the battery does not bug out, that is. Choose your poison: a very vague location that is available to you all time or a very precice location that you might not have later that day.

My friend discovered the GPXview application and is into geocaching now. He’s really having fun. At times he would jump up at 22hr and dash out to find the cache he has just discovered on the web. It was freezing outside and he took the motorcycle. The sort of fun that gets you out of the door. Amazing.

Battery

Battery lifetime is a dog. Period. The only thing that aleviates this is the fact that with the charger, the USB cable and the adapter and the charger from my e61i phone, I have three ways of charging the device. And in the future more and more phones will use micro USB and thus more and more people will have a micro USB cable with them. No more: “Does anyone per chance have a charger for phone xyz?”

The software and stuff

One of the main reasons for me not to buy an iPhone is the firm grasp of control Apple is choking their customers with. With the N900 I can simply use my prepaid Simyo card I am so happy with, without having to break into my own device.

The dusty squareness of S60 had bugged me for a while. With the Maemo user interface Nokia has already done a whole slew of things right. Agreed, there is also a bunch of strange quirks, but I am sure that these will be resolved with the upcoming releases of the software.

In my anticipation of the phone I had read a lot of reports and blog entries. Thus I already knew a lot about the rough edges that might leave the uninitiated wondering and fiddling. I knew that to get back you’d have to klick on the background and such. So when I started using the device, I had absolutely no problems to get around, use and configure it.

Some things are really an improvement in comparison to the e61i/Symbian 60. For example the conversations. Your communication with a person is being presented as a dialogue. No matter whether you used SMS or Jabber messages. The old way of listing SMS messages in incoming folders sorted by date and filing what you sent in the outgoing folder feels so outdated. I guess credits for this have to go in the direction of Apple, but this is really how it should be done. Nice.

The Apple address book has for long had the ability to attach icons to contacts. The e61i actually was able to display them, but being able to place icons of my friends on the desktop made me go and fish for some nice pictures of them. I really like this. Also the way of offering all the possible contact ways to you when you tap on the icon is really good. Nothing compared to the hell of dialogue menus on the e61i. How often have I dialled a contact and wondered why nothing happens, just to discover that the phone was asking “voice call or video call?”. “Stop asking! Have I ever done a video call, you idiot!?”.

iSync

I am really glad that these guys are providing an iSync plugin for the N900. Actually I would have waited with the purchase for the possibility to sync contacts and calendars. Without this I might even have opted for the e72. So kudos for the developers. Thank you.

Calendar

I was surprised how good and functional the calendar looks like. But it leaves a couple of wishes unfulfilled. I wish I could configure the widget to display more entries and consume more space on the desktop. Then the entries from the different calendars all end up on one calendar on the device and entries made on the phone all end up in one local calendar in iCal. I really wish that if I have five calendars on my computer,  syncing would automagically produce the same five calendars on my phone. And that making an entry in one of those would sync to the corresponding calendar on the computer.

Ah well, and then I wish the calendar would support CalDAV, which would make the iSync plugin obsolete in this respect. As far as I know the iPhone is the only phone right now which supports CalDAV and the guys at work are using it with our Zimbra calendar server. Smooth.

Network

Another thing that is well done in comparison to the e61i is the way the phone connects to 3G data and Wifi. I don’t have to allow it to use the net more than once. If a known wifi network is in range, it will automatically select that one, saving money. Otherwise it will transparently connect to my Simyo data setting.

Before the N900 I used roundabout 10€ per month for my phone. That includes calls, SMS and data. Yes, I am not a phone talker, at least not on the mobile. We do have a landline flatrate at home and at work, so when I want to talk, I have cheaper options.

Now with the new phone I will surely use a lot more data volume. I am curious how much more that will actually be. It it exceeds ten Euros, I will simply buy the Simyo ‘Flatrate’ which is 1Gb of data for ten Euros. That’ll be enough.

I have seen that there is an OpenVPN client in the repository, but I need an IPSec or a PPTP client if I want to connect to the company. I am not going to install yet another VPN on my firewall. Knowing there is Linux underneath I am pretty sure that this will work out over time. Maybe not with a nice GUI, but running a script from the shell is fine with me.

Surfing the interwebs

The built in browser is really usable and responsive. Some have complained about the spinning zoom gesture and I agree. Somehow this is strange. But the double tap zoom works so well in most of the cases, that you barely ever need the spin gesture. Nice to know it is there. Unfortunately it only seems to work in the browser and not in any of the other apps. Am I missing something?

The built in browser runs in competition with the Fennec variant of Firefox. The FF can use Weave to sync tabs and bookmarks, which I actually use for my different computers and which is really handy. But somehow FF feels much slower than the built in browser, which is why I am still undecided which one will be my default browser. Browsing the web both yield excellent results with the crisp and high resolution display. Even flash videos are possible and thus the best mobile browsing experience crown should go to the Nokia N900. Surfing on this device is really fun.

Social networks

Instant messaging and microblogging is built right into the device and fortunately Nokia not only supports the big players like Twitter but via the Twitter API also identi.ca (aka Status.net which had Version 0.9 released two days ago btw) and Jabber. With MaStory and Mauku a blogging and a microblogging client are readily available. I am not writing this post from the phone, since I have been talking to myself half a day now and knew it is going to be a lengthy post. Enthusiast yes. Masochist no.

Yes, the iPhone has rondabout ten thousand Twitter clients, but how many are going to use at the same time? One. The iPhone can not multitask.

The OS

A shell is built in. Need I say more?

When Gweled crashed, I figured out that you can activate the taskmanager by pressing the top left and top right keys on the keyboard simultanously. If you attempt to close the hanging app, the OS will eventually recognize that the app is unresponsive and offers you to kill it. Nice.

Other than that, it is truly multitasking. I have the notes app open all the time in order to have a GTD input panel within quick reach all the time. Apart from that there are always a couple of other apps running, the media player, the address book, you name it. This works so smooth that you actually forget about it. Whenever I do something with the iPhones of my colleagues I find myself constantly switching between apps which is inconvenient given that they are always closed and started.

Booting takes roundabout 35 to 40 seconds, which is actually better than the e61i. But not much.

Quirks

If you switch to the program list, you’ll have a limitied list on the first page and a ‘more’ button. On the second page you can scroll through the rest of the apps. That’s inconsistent, but not really a problem.

The conversations widget shows the first lines of incoming messages which is nice in a way, but can be very compromising if you have your phone laying around for others to see.

The repositories and the Ovi store are not synced. Some of the apps you’ll find here, others there. I wish they’d simply put every application that is available for free into the program manager repositories.

The internet radio list is prepopulated with roundabout forty stations I don’t now how to get rid of. It is really easy to get a new station into the list, but how do I clean the house? If you start typing while in the list, it is being filtered and you can find the station you’re looking for quite effortless, but still.

The device can be set to poll your mail accounts which made me realize with a *bling* at two a clock in the morning that I really don’t have to install any updates on the server the next day when the cronjob ran and sent the email. I wish it were possible to set a time range of ‘between 7 in the morning and twelve at night poll my accounts’.

As you can see, these quirks are not really big show stoppers, but rather rough edges that can be polished over time.

Conclusion

Over all the N900 is an awsome device. Other than with the e61i I have the impression that I will use it much more to its potential than the e61i. Not only because it is much more capable, but also because it is much more usable. It combines convenience and fun.

It will replace my camera (which is not in my posession any more anyway, but I won’t buy a new camera) and will serve as my gps device. I don’t need turn by turn navigation, map and location are fine. It will replace my general purpose mp3 player, which died on my recently with a non servicable battery. It will not replace my iPod Shuffle which I use for sport activities. The N900 is simply too bulky and heavy to jog around with.

For reading eBooks I am still hoping to have something like the Skiff reader sometime. While the display of the N900 is crisp and shiny, it lacks the screen estate and the dedicated software and usability for that purpose.

I guess it will also let me leave my Laptop at home more often, since everything you need to check the servers and give them a nudge if needed is provided.

datum: 10. März 10
in: Gadget
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