NOTE: I probably shouldn’t even be posting this. As I say later all images/specs of the N9 online are the result of unconfirmed rumors that are pretty widely contested for technical and logical reasons.
The current phone I would like to swaddle and carry around like a baby is the Nokia N9 (picture from SlashGear).
Nothing has been officially confirmed by Nokia yet. We’re not even sure the device pictured above is what the phone will look like (there are some pictures online of a black phone claiming to be the N9). EDIT: It sounds like the phone will be available in silver and black (the keyboard will be black on both versions).
Rumored specs: (found here, originally obtained here I think)
I’m a simple man with simple needs. The Nokia N900 is awesome. There is a huge body of people developing cool applications for Maemo 5, the N900′s operating system. In fact, I only have a few problems, none of them very large problems.
For instance, there’s no Shazam app for the N900. I used that program all the time on my old phone to identify music in restaurants and on the radio.
You can’t have multiple ringtones on the N900, for instance giving each contact a custom ringtone. Not a big deal, but still odd that the N900 doesn’t allow it. In fact, that feature is so common in all phones now, it’s not even anything I thought to investigate when researching the N900.
The biggest problem for me was reading RSS feeds in Google Reader. I love Google Reader. On my pc. The interface is a little hard to use on the tiny N900 screen, and using the iPhone’s mobile Google Reader interrface doesn’t sort feeds by web site, nor does it act at all like I want it to.
This was a problem, and I have even been evaluating other web-based feed readers for a better mobile interface, when I read about Grr.
One of the reasons I bought an N900 was so I could put a 16GB microSD card in it and use it as an mp3 player. The N900 has 32GB of storage–about 26GB of that are available due to the N900 needing about 6GB for system files. Adding a 16GB SD card makes 40GB total available for files such as mp3s.
I don’t even have 40GB of mp3s on this device, because I need to save space for downloaded files, photos, etc. Right now I have maybe 35GB of music on my N900, split between the internal storage and the microSD card. This, by the way, from someone who nearly ran out of space on a 120GB Zune. 110GB – all music, no videos (the Zune Pass subscription service was primarily to blame).
Right now the device has 8,465 songs on it, according to the N900′s default media player.
I had a N800, the first or one of the first mobile devices to use the Mozilla web rendering engine. I really didn’t notice any difference between Mozilla’s engine and the N800′s stock engine, so it wasn’t a big deal to me.
In addition, it wasn’t a big deal to me when I heard that Firefox for Mobile would be used on the N900, either. Until I heard that it supports Mozilla Weave.
Weave is an addon for Firefox that syncs bookmarks and passwords like Xmarks, but in addition it also syncs history and tabs that are open on your other devices. I just started using it today (on my desktop and netbook, I don’t own an N900 yet), so I’ll have a more in-depth Weave post in a few days. Watch this short video to see Firefox’s mobile browser in action on the N900 (Weave is only touched upon briefly), I’ll talk about more after.
Imagine you’re at your desktop, reading an article online, waiting for a friend to come pick you up. You get a text, your friend is outside. You go to a restaurant where there’s a 30-minute wait. You can now pull out your phone and resume reading the article you were reading at home. After that, you can continue your browsing in full on the N900, because it supports the full web.
First, a while ago I read this interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He expresses confusion that Google seems to be abandoning Android as a netbook OS in favor of Chrome OS. I was a little confused about that too, but Chrome OS does make more sense on a non-touch screen netbook than Android does. Also, the idea that an OS is really a browser is something Ubuntu needs to start thinking about. Windows 7′s search-able start menu is arguably their best feature (yes, Vista had it too).
On my honor, I was just thinking about this very thing, a watch that could connect to a smartphone via bluetooth. This prototype is for Blackberry only, it isn’t available now but may be someday. With the very long range of Bluetooth 2.0 this is a really good idea.
Verizon is blasting the iPhone in their new “Droid Can” ads in favor of the Android OS. Now it’s rumored a 4G iPhone might pop up on Verizon. At least you’re not burning any bridges…
Android is getting the advantage in the cell phone market now. It’s not locked to any hardware, so people can access the large app base with the form factor they most want. Even Maemo, which I think is better, only shows up on Nokia phones despite it’s being open source. I was hoping the Nokia N900 would position itself against the iPhone the way Verizon is doing with the Droid ads, but Nokia might already be a lost cause. Their last quarter reports are pretty bad. With smartphones, at least.
Android really is the techno-hydra. It’s non-exclusive and I don’t think Nokia can beat it in the US when their smartphone will only be fully compatible with one carrier. I mean really, the N900′s success in the US seems to be dependent on how well T-Mobile’s Project Dark goes. I don’t know if I like that very much.
I’m fine with using Android over Windows Mobile or the iPhone, but I really, really would like to see Nokia and Maemo get the success it deserves.
Holy crap I am really talking up the N900, a device that I’ve never seen and hasn’t even been released yet. It’s apparent I’m a Nokia fanboy, even though the only Nokia device is own is the N800. I thought I’d write a post that better explains why I like the idea of this phone so much.
This was originally a digression within a really long post about using my N800 as a 64GB mp3 player. That post was long enough so I’ve ripped this bit out and placed it here.
I posted some tweets about this over the past week, but it bears repeating and explaining, so here goes:
I bought my N800 used. The guy who sold it to me wanted the money to buy a then brand-new first generation iPhone. I bought it because I was away from home for work and I had no portable computer. My laptop was on it’s last legs and wouldn’t work outside of it’s dock.
At the time I was crashing with a friend that didn’t have internet, so I needed something small and portable I could take anywhere I could get online. The eeePC 701 was yet to be released for another few months.
So my 120GB Zune broke. I admit it, I dropped it a lot. I went back to using my 80GB Archos 504, which has a few problems, but it served to remind me of all the ways it is better than the Zune. The only things I ever had against the Archos 504 were the large physical size and occasional freezes (freezes they’ve since fixed). The Zune requires Windows to transfer music, it requires it’s own software which by default overwrites all your id3 tags and cover art (it seriously, seriously fucked up my collection and I will never forget it). I didn’t like being forced to navigate music by id3 tag. I didn’t like how big of a pain in the ass it was to put one album on my Zune–something I can do in half a minute from any PC (running any OS) with my 504. This 504, by the way, is the mp3 player I used to take with me to construction sites. It’s been dropped a hundred more times than the Zune and is still going strong. Maybe that’s because it uses a 2.5″ laptop drive instead of whatever tiny custom drive the Zune has.
A few weeks ago I posted about 64GB flash players, wondering why there’s only one on the US market and why it’s an iPod. There are dozens of companies that only make flash mp3 players. Why has none of them released a 64GB model?
What you see before you is the Nokia N900 portable internet device and phone. Looks similar to the Nokia N810 internet tablet, but pictures are deceiving. The N900 is much smaller, about the size of my HTC Touch Pro.
The N900 has the same processor as the iPhone, a comparable graphics processor (slightly less powerful, I think), more RAM, 32GB internal memory and a microSDHC slot (expandable up to 16GB). It has a full 3.5″ jack for audio and video, it has an accelerometer, and it has a ridiculous capacity for multitasking. By “ridiculous,” I mean you have 4 separate desktops, you can have a handful of apps running, have multiple web pages open, be streaming music, etc. It also has Flash 9.4 support. Yeah, get ready for a lot more Flash capable phones in the future, it’s a deal-maker.
It’s battery life is rated for a ‘full day’ of of streaming music, surfing the net, watching movies, etc–what they call ‘full use’. The term ‘full day’ can be misleading, it usually means a full work day. People are reporting 12-13 hours with ‘full use’–using internet, GPS, and watching movies. Hey, with laptops ‘full day’ only means 8 hours.
A bigger selling point for the N900 is Maemo, Nokia’s open source mobile OS. Android is a cell-phone (and tablet?) OS based on Linux that may some day be expanded to work on netbooks and desktop PCs. Maemo is a tablet/cell phone OS built on Linux, and it’s essentially desktop Linux scaled down to work with lower resolutions and less powerful hardware. Both are open source, but Maemo is the more open of the two, and I’m told much easier to port to. I’ve never tried Android, though I’m anxious to. I have used Maemo (not version 5), and found it very satisfying. Here is a demo video of Maemo 5:
(PSST–The device used to demo Maemo 5 in that video is the N900) There’s a video of the N900 actually in use way down at the bottom of this post.
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