For months there has been confusion about the intentions of Finnish handset company Nokia over which operating systems it will continue to support ‘ all of which appears to have been triggered by the shift of its Maemo Linux-alike system for its internet tablets shifting to working on something far more like a phone.
Our take is that ‘No,’ Nokia is not dumping Symbian, but it ‘IS’ using Maemo as well on phones. And yes it is embracing Windows on the new Netbooks, but not on anything smaller. And Android IS the enemy and there are no plans for Nokia to use it in anything right now, nor are there likely to be.
But the specification of the N900 has really, perhaps for the first time in years, created a class of device ‘ low footprint tablet, that is small enough to be a phone, with Nokia in a global lead. This is a device which could double as the Apple tablet that everyone is talking about ‘ feature for feature.
But there remains some confusion still, with much N900 coverage suggesting that Ovi is not on the N900 and that Ovi is just for Symbian phones, which is clearly not the case. What Nokia is striving for in software is a transparent service layer and doesn’t care what operating system is driving the hardware. There will be Ovi phones for Series 40 as well.
While the N900 won’t have Ovi Store support on the day it is launched it now appears that a service called Maemo Select is a filter for the Ovi Store ‘ so part of the Ovi Apps are already working on the N900 ‘ Ovi Maps, Ovi Share, Ovi Files, Ovi Contacts and full Ovi Store support, and N-Gage gaming is on its way.
If you take the touch sensitivity of the N900 and add all of the N-Gage games which have been created over the past 4 years, you have a game environment something like the iPod Touch, but on a bigger screen, and with more processing power.
So suddenly the N900 is a rival to the Sony PSP, is a sound Internet tablet and it’s a phone and a media player. It has a sideways slide out Qwerty keyboard as well as touch on the surface, and it can multitask better than almost any phone on the market.
The device first made the rounds as the promised Rover back in March with just mock ups shown and it looked a lot further away, but was launched last week for October delivery. It comes at €500 (£440 or $716) and puts Nokia firmly on top of the Smart Phone world for at least a week until Apple launches its reply.
Nokia is showing it off at Nokia World in Germany and we imagine that operators will flock to offer this device on contract.
Nokia says that it is pushing this at the enterprise and will use it as a stepping stone to get itself in to the US, but we think people will find there is a consumer hunger for it. It doesn’t look too different from an N97, it comes with a 3.5 inch 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen, and it has huge in-built storage.
The device runs the latest Maemo 5 software, which Nokia says is powerful enough to have dozens of application windows open at once but still has the oomph to take calls, drive the touch screen and take input from the Qwerty keyboard.
‘With Linux software, Mozilla-based browser technology and now also with cellular connectivity, the Nokia N900 delivers a powerful mobile experience,’ says Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Markets, Nokia. ‘The Nokia N900 shows where we are going with Maemo and we’ll continue to work with the community to push the software forward.’
The Nokia N900 uses an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, has up to 1GB of RAM, and supports OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration and it is this that Nokia says will give it PC-like multitasking. It has GPS, a WVGA touch screen, supports the latest HSPA and Wi-Fi. It looks like a new Mozilla based browser is installed so that websites look the same way they would on a PC and video is supported by the inclusion of Adobe Flash 9.4.
The Nokia N900 comes with 32GB of storage, expandable to 48GB, a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics and will be available in select markets from October 2009. We are all waiting with bated breath to see if and how Apple tops this.