Nokia N900 - Review

“Nokia's N900 offers smartphone features in an unconventional but functional body. The display is great for watching videos, but the phone's operating system can cause confusion”

Maemo operating system

Nokia's N900 uses a little-known operating system

The first thing that struck me about Nokia’s N900 smartphone was its thickness: roughly that of two HTC Desires. At at 81g the N900 is quite heavy – some 44g heavier than Apple’s iPhone 4.

HTC’s and Apple’s devices are industry-leading smartphones, whereas Nokia markets the N900 as a miniature PC because the phone runs a little known operating system (OS) called Maemo.

Don’t let this put you off because the N900 still functions like many other Nokia mobile phones: well thought-out and organised.

For example, apps can be downloaded from the Ovi Store (Nokia’s answer to Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market) and then conveniently placed anywhere on the phone’s four ‘flickable’ screens.

The N900’s applications opened refreshingly quickly. Ovi Maps (Nokia’s answer to Google Maps) has caused me problems in the past by being too slow to load. On the N900, however, Ovi Maps was swift and switched to a satellite view of London sprinkled with 3D landmarks with pleasing swiftness.

Nokia Ovi store

The kickstand is handy for watching films

Stylus-based navigation quickly proved the easiest way to navigate through the N900 because, despite having a 3.5in touchscreen, the display didn’t respond well to my fingers. Sometimes I had to poke icons three or four times before they opened.

The Qwerty keypad that slides out from below the screen means you don’t need to use the stylus to write emails and text messages, thankfully.

As a big Firefox fan I was pleased to see the browser featured on the N900. It meant surfing the web on the Nokia smartphone was almost as easy as using Firefox on my PC.

The smartphone comes with a massive 32GB of onboard storage and a Micro SD memory card slot, giving you plenty of capacity for videos and music.

Speaking of music, a 3.5mm headphone jack and integrated speaker offered me two ways of listening to music on the N900. The phone’s on-board music software isn’t as visually appealing as iTunes but it does the job and makes finding tracks pretty painless.

Video smartphone

Lots of storage is available on the N900

Watching N900 video proved excellent and I was really impressed by the clarity of the smartphone’s screen. Videos were smooth, crisp and a pleasure to watch.

I would have liked the option to watch videos in portrait mode, but Nokia said the phone only supports the latter for incoming calls. So whether browsing applications, taking pictures or writing emails, you’ll pretty much only ever hold the N900 horizontally.

A rear-mounted 5Mp camera takes decent photographs, with the dual LED flash able to shine lots of light on even the darkest photo locations.

The N900’s range of photography tools, which includes a white balance adjuster, several pre-set shooting modes and geo-tagging options, will be a welcome surprise for mobile-based photography fans.

After an entire day of web surfing, app downloading, photo taking, video watching and more the N900’s battery (which was full in the morning) still held enough charge for several telephone calls.