Nokia’s N900 delivery is back on the November agenda, after being delayed from its original delivery dates, which were to have been around now. Devices are on their way to stores now, after concerns that the device would miss the all important Christmas buying season, and it may even hit the US market before Thanksgiving. Delays were caused by Nokia wanting to satisfy its existing Maemo developers that the phone was ready for all their Apps.
The N900 comes with a large touch screen and is built on the Nokia Maemo version of Linux, and with the processing power to handle lots of applications concurrently. To buy it straight from Nokia it will cost you €500, which is perilously close to £500 ($750), and operator offers are not up yet, but will be loaded onto web sites in the coming days.
‘The Nokia N900 has generated a lot of interest since its public launch in August, which has been reflected in the device preorders,’ says Jos’-Luis Martinez, Vice President, Nseries, Nokia. ‘What’s exciting is the Maemo software, which takes its cues from the desktop computer and offers a full browsing experience like no other handset. We believe the Nokia N900 will be a very compelling device for people who are passionate about technology.’
The Nokia N900 has a powerful ARM Cortex-A8 processor and up to 1GB of total application memory. Users can browse the internet the way they would on any computer and keep dozens of application windows open simultaneously on the dashboard. The panoramic desktops in the Nokia N900 can be personalized with widgets, contacts and shortcuts. Pictures and videos taken with the 5MP Carl Zeiss camera automatically show where they were taken, and users can add their own description tags. SMS and instant messages are organized as chat flow in multiple conversation windows. The built-in 32 GB storage is big enough to store up to 7,000 songs or 40 hours of DVD-quality video, and it can be expanded up to 48GB with an external microSD card.
Nokia has now made it abundantly clear that the N900 will have (limited) access to the Ovi Store and to Maemo Select (a Maemo verson of Ovi that Nokia is now building), later in the year. Nokia has also satisfied developers that its older Qt development environment has been ported to Maemo 5 so they can use Qt software to target the Nokia N900 and that applications can be easily ported.
The Nokia N900 will initially be available in Europe, Middle-East, Russia and North America. It is also possible to order the device from the Nokia Online Store.
In the meantime Nokia has increased its share of the full-OS handset market, reaching 38% (from 37% a year ago), and the trend is likely to continue as smartphones reach out to Nokia’s area of strength, the mass market.
The quarterly survey from IDC found that Nokia’s new flagship, the N97, enhanced its lead of the smartphone market slightly, and in the current quarter, the vendor will not only have additional high end models, like the N900, but will be hoping to ride on the rising mid-market demand for full-platform phones, with devices like the N97 Mini.
In the IDC league table, RIM overtook Apple for second place, with 30% share, and although it remained heavily dependent on north America, outside that region, its revenues did treble year-on-year from a small base.
Apple recorded its highest volume yet in a single quarter as its flagship 3GS went global, and the release in China could improve its fortunes further in Q4. However, this was not enough to keep it in second place- it slipped to third, with 16.7% share, with HTC in fourth and Samsung fifth.