Nokia N900 Blogger Preview

Went to the Nokia N900 blogger preview which took place at Segafredo located at 51 Telok Ayer Street, #01-06, Chinasquare Plaza. First off, the Nokia N900 will be launching in Singapore at the end of March 2010. No local pricing is available yet, but elsewhere the RRP is US$649 = S$911.78.

Specifications

Processor: ARM Cortex-A8 600MHz
Memory: Up to 1GB (256MB RAM + 768MB virtual memory)
System: WCDMA 900/1700/2100 (HSPA), EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
OS: Maemo 5
Dimensions: 110.9 x 59.8 x 18 mm (L x W x H) *19.55 mm at camera area
Weight: 181 g
Display: 3.5 inch widescreen (800×480 pixels) touch
Battery: Nokia Battery BL-5J, 1320 mAh
Storage: Up to 48GB (32 GB on-board, 16GB expansion via microSD memory card slot)
Video playback: H.264, MPEG-4, Xvid up to WVGA (800×480) resolution in 25fps. WMV up to VGA resolution in 30fps. Flash Video streaming in browser
Music playback: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, M4A, WAV, WMA
Main Camera: Carl Zeiss Tessar Lens
Image capture: Up to 5 megapixels (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7 million/24-bit color)
Video capture: MPEG-4 WVGA (800 x 480) at up to 25 fps
Aperture: 2.8
Focal length: 5.2
Flash: Dual LED camera fash and video light

Operating Times

Always online: Up to 2-4 days (TCP/IP connected)
Talk time: Up to 5hrs WCDMA, 9hrs GSM
Active online usage: Up to 1+ day

Connectivity & Data Services

WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g with UPnP support
BT 2.1 with support for stereo headsets
Integrated FM transmitter
Integrated GPS with A-GPS
Nokia AV connector 3.5mm for audio input/output and TV out
Micro-USB 2.0 high speed for file transfers and charging

Thoughts

The N900 is VERY responsive because of the ARM Cortex-A8 processor
The ability to multitask and run background programs is a plus point, the product manager tried running up to 27 background applications and it doesn’t lag
It support flash
Interesting gesture to zoom in and out using the browser. Swirl clockwise to zoom in and swirl anti-clock wise to zoom out
No dedicated hardware button to access the menu
Need 3 steps to access other menus. Need to press the “application window” icon, then followed by the “6 squares” icon and then the “more” icon
The apps are open source, hopefully this will encourage more developers to develop for Maemo
Supports updating of 3rd party apps easily
Incoming notification such as SMS are non-obtrusive, it will appear for a while at the top then fade away
It is 1.5x thicker than iPhone because of the slide out QWERTY keypad, but the height and width is about the same
Price is pretty steep if directly converted from the US$649 RRP