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.