NOKIA N900
Nokia is unwise to keep their Eseries design team separate from their Nseries design team. While the business Eseries devices are sleek and lean, Nokia’s Nseries phones, including the Nokia N900, are chunky, heavy blocks. Though the Nokia N900 feels like a solid device, with rich materials and a smooth, professional finish, it isn’t especially attractive, and the design disappoints when you start using the device. There are no buttons on the face of the phone. It lacks Send and End buttons, a Back button or a Menu key, and all of these would have been an improvement. There is a lock switch and a power button, which seems redundant, but few shortcuts for onboard features besides the shallow, 2-stage camera shutter button. Because the phone uses a resistive touchscreen, Nokia has bundled a stylus, and it’s one of the cheapest plastic styli we’ve seen on a phone.
You won’t necessarily need to break out the stylus with this phone, as Nokia has created their most touch-friendly user interface to date in the new Maemo operating system. The screen is very responsive to the touch, and quite forgiving if you’re just a little bit off pressing the tiny onscreen buttons. The interface has a very smooth and polished look. Nokia fans will recognize the familiar onscreen fonts and application icons, but the phone also uses plenty of blur effects and animated screen transitions to give the OS a modern look and feel.
It’s not very intuitive, unfortunately. To move back and forth between menus, sometimes you press a back button onscreen, and sometimes you simply tap off-window. The design is also inconsistent among the apps, especially the Web browser and Ovi Maps apps. Frankly, the multiple desktop homescreen with active widgets and hidden application menu has already been done much better on modern Android devices, like the Motorola Droid, so even Nokia’s most advanced effort feels a step behind the curve. But compared to the aging Symbian OS on every other Nokia smartphone, the Maemo interface is a dramatic step forward. It would have been a welcome addition to Nokia’s N97.
Calling and Contacts– Good
While previous Linux-based Internet Tablets from Nokia, like the Nokia N810, skipped built-in cellular network support and just stuck with Wi-Fi for online access, the Nokia N900 uses GSM radios for voice and data. In an unusual move, Nokia has opted to support T-Mobile’s 3G HSDPA network instead of the larger, more popular AT&T radio bands, though the phone can also connect to European 3G data networks. You can use the Nokia N900 with AT&T’s voice and slower EDGE network, but you won’t get 3G speeds. We tested the phone on T-Mobile’s network.
The phone app on the Nokia N900 can place normal voice calls, but it also integrates Skype and even Google Talk directly into the dialer. You just click on a menu in the phone app to change the type of outgoing call you’re making. This was a bit confusing at first, as Skype calls require a “+1″ country code for U.S. calls, but once we learned the protocols it was a breeze.
Voice calls sounded good with the Nokia N900. Call quality was similar whether we were using Skype for VoIP on the T-Mobile data network, or GSM for normal cellular voice calls. On both systems our callers heard a slightly distant sound and background hiss during calls, but this didn’t interfere much with our conversations. On our end, calls sounded very clean and clear.
For calling features, the Nokia N900 comes up far short of what we expect from a modern smartphone. Battery life was abysmal. We never managed to break the 4 hour mark for talk time, which is a few hours shy of what we expect from a very good smartphone, like the Motorola Droid or BlackBerry Bold 9700. Reception was very good, though, and we always saw 4-5 bars of service on T-Mobile’s 3G network.
The address book on the Nokia N900 is also quite simple compared to the best smartphones on the market. We had no trouble synchronizing with our corporate Exchange account thanks to Nokia’s Mail for Exchange sync app, but other online address books are not yet supported. You can use the Nokia PC Suite on a Windows machine to sync with your favorite PIM, but don’t expect the sort of social networking integration you’ll find on the Palm Pre’s WebOS or a good Android device. The phone can’t gather information from Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networks.
For other calling features, the Nokia N900 is a surprising letdown. There’s no voice dialing on the device, which is a necessary feature that we use often while driving. There’s no visual voicemail support, though this feature usually requires carrier backing, so it’s no surprise here. Conference calling was difficult to manage, as the drop down menu to activate the feature was small and somewhat hidden during calls, and the language Nokia uses to describe the feature is unclear. The phone does have a high quality speakerphone, thanks to the dual speakers on the side of the device, and the kickstand helps keep the speakers from getting muffled, but we’d still like the volume to be much louder. » Read more: Nokia N900 review
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Device Description
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