Nokia N900 Live Session Notes, Impressions, Videos (2.5hrs)

Posted on 13 October 2009, Last updated on 21 September 2019 by

Thanks to the 850 people that dropped in to the session last night. We ran for about 4 hours and in that time you racked up 940 hours of viewing. That’s a lot of attention so clearly we’re getting something right with the live reviews.

The first thing to note from last nigh’ts N900 session is that there we didn’t find any show stoppers. Sizing is clearly an issue for some but within the bounds of the size of the device, Nokia have done an incredible job and married it with a software stack that is fit for the next-generation of ‘computing-first’ handhelds for both the geek and consumer community. Pricing appears to be acceptable to our target audience too. Over 85% of those voting in a poll during the session said it was value for money based on street prices we’re seeing of 500-550 Euros.  In Germany the N900 is already free from some third-party resellers with high-end contracts.

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In the first part of the session we took  a look around the hardware and discussed some of the key points related to the hardware. We highlighted that the front-facing cam, consumer IR and FM radio don’t have any software support yet and talked about the issue of portrait mode which, apart from the size, is the most restrictive element of the device. Currently, unless you are in phone mode, there’s no way to really use this device with one hand in portrait mode. Nokia know about this though and are talking about covering it in a firmware update later this year.

Full coverage of the N900 in our N900 information page.

On the positive side though, the N900 gets praise for its interleaved ‘conversations’ panel that brings in notifications from SMS, Gtalk, Skype and other networks into one notifications system. See this in the second video. In the other direction, the sharing feature with its plug-in support is going to easily allow third parties to provide an authorization and sending channel for many many web-based services. Flickr, pixelpipe and others are already supported.

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The browser has to be one of the best we’ve seen on a pocketable ARM-based device. Full javascript support and full Flash 9 support elevate this above others and because of the impressive processing power, finally open up the world of online web-based apps to the smartphone user. YouTube videos (low quality versions, not HQ or HD) played back in windowed and full-screen mode with fluidity. Some video codecs seem to be missing but this might be because we’re dealing with a pre-production sample here. DivX support goes up over 4mbps so I’m expecting H.264 to work at 2mbps which is about the bitrate you’ll find on a YouTube HD video. When Adobe get 10.1 working on the N900 with the video decoding hardware it’s going to be heaven for YouTube fans!

Continued on next page.

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15 Comments For This Post

  1. Steve 'Chippy' Paine says:

    Nokia N900 Live Session Notes, Impressions, Videos (2.5hrs) #maemo http://cli.gs/qndsr

  2. Alessandro Tucci says:

    RT @chippy: Nokia N900 Live Session Notes, Impressions, Videos (2.5hrs) #maemo http://cli.gs/qndsr

  3. Missy Haddad says:

    RT @chippy Nokia N900 Live Session Notes, Impressions, Videos (2.5hrs) #maemo http://cli.gs/qndsr

  4. Oliver says:

    RT @chippy: Nokia N900 Live Session Notes, Impressions, Videos (2.5hrs) #maemo http://cli.gs/qndsr

  5. Mark Hirsch says:

    Nokia N900 Live Session Notes, Impressions, Videos (2.5hrs) http://bit.ly/2LFMv

  6. Genís says:

    RT @chippy: Nokia N900 Live Session Notes, Impressions, Videos (2.5hrs) #maemo http://cli.gs/qndsr

  7. quazy says:

    I was kidding myself by thinking I could live with such a small screen. I think jkk hit it right on when he said if it had the same or similar size screen as the n810 he would be more tempted to buy one. It gets frustrating on my viliv s5 viewing some web content. I dont want to image now what it would be like on the n900. I was so sold/impressed watching the videos. Then at the end you guys crushed my hopes. By explaining the pitfalls of a device like the screen size and such. With no 3g coverage where i live. I guess i should stick to my two gadget setup. First gen iphone and this viliv s5. Maybe soon we will have a device with a 4+ in screen that have full flash and will fit in a pocket nicely. I want to end this by saying thank you so much to steve and jkk for doing these shows and giving us your honest opinions on these devices.

  8. Patrick says:

    This is a smartphone and not a umpc. You could buy a HTC HD2 that has 4.3″ screen but HTC Sense UI can’t compete with Maemo integration and wont be capable to do so any time soon because of mobile providers requiring locked interface (HTC has no SDK for UI). I currently have old HTC TyTn2, the phone has 2.8″ screen. Screen is cramped but it is enough for the things i operate on it (server monitoring). Currently i think N900 is the best thing after the sliced bread in SMARTPHONE segment, Nokia can market it how ever they want it but n900 is still a “classical” smartphone trailing HTC flagship TouchPro2 device only in keyboard and number of 3rd party applications.

  9. Carl says:

    Hopefully if the N900 is successful Nokia is going to make a range of devices using Maemo. A ~4-4.5″ screen (with minimal bezel) and telephony features intact would serve me best, but we all have different dream devices.

    At the very least Maemo looks like it’s capable of scaling to different form factors.

  10. Dennis says:

    I agree that this is a huge step forward for Maemo more so than a smart phone with broad appeal. I really am interested in seeing what happens with this whole deal.

  11. Mike Cane says:

    Dear god, Chippy. It went around 5 hours. My eyes were useless afterwards.

    There must be some way to go back to the old UStream chat method. This new one is just too buggy.

    First person who mentions “IRC Client” dies.

  12. chippy says:

    The current session is actually an IRC client – Web based.
    We are trying to find a new chat method.

  13. Carl says:

    I just finished watching them all. Great stuff. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a smartphone watch a flash-based livecast in realtime before.

  14. Ricky says:

    Wow, great job guys. I think this phone is overkill for average SmartPhone users. =) I been thinking about getting a smart phone this whole year and have compared several phones and by far this phone looks the most promising. I just wanted a smart phone that could browse the web like my ipod touch 2g, but not be an iphone. The end of the 2.5 hour intro to N900 was pretty depressing but then again this is coming from hardcore UMPC geeks and not from regular SmartPhone users. I agree that next year the successor will be for the mass b/c it would have a bigger screen that is capacitive, have a xenon flash and have a full qwerty keyboard and better software but till then I don’t see anything that comes close to bringing the full convergence of devices. Its funny how devices are merging and the line between them are blurring.
    This phone definitely has gotten me thinking, can this phone replace my ipod touch’s web browser experience and my compact digital camera, plus make be good at being a phone? I think the phone can, but maybe it can’t replace your UMPC. That’s it! Nokia wants to sell the N900 as a mobile computer but it’s more like the best SmartPhone merging into a the best mobile computer. So what this means is that the future of the complete merger depends heavily on the success of the N900, so to me this means support for many years after it is released. Sounds pretty good to me! I am getting the phone but to be a SmartPhone + replace my ipod touch and compact digital camera.

  15. Giles says:

    I think this device is impressive enough to make me wanna sell my Gigabyte T1028 and get a N900 and a Notebook with 15-17 inch screen and some hardcore processing power. That really seems like a good and complete combo. At the moment I’m on Nokia N85 for calls, email viewing, gps, pics, video and share online. Netbook for mobile web and basic computing and replying to email. Desktop for the CPU. I have the sneaking suspition that the N900 is going to completely re-order my life. Woohoo!! I like!!!

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