Desktop Look and Feel Promised on the Nokia N900

No one can blame Nokia for taking its mobile handsets to look and feel like a desktop PC. But you have to hand it to them for coming out with mobile handsets that approximate PC computing anywhere with increasingly powerful mobile smartphones. The Finish world leader in mobile phones has just released the Nokia N900 smartphone running the 5th iteration of the Maemo OS once reserved to its portfolio of Internet Tablets.
Taking off where the N810 left, the new N900 combines sophisticated internet messaging for which the Internet Tablet is known for and mobile telephony features in one full-QWERTY slider touchscreen smartphone.
Desktop PC Power in your hands
The N900 is a hefty smartphone that’s nearly 2 centimeters thick (18.2mm to be exact) and is among the heaviest QWERTY slider touchscreens at 185 grams. Nokia has put all its muscle on this one and its three processors could account for its heft. Apart from its powerful main processor ARM Cortex A8 clocked at 600, the handset benefits from a separate 3D graphics accelerator and GPU that supports OpenGL ES- PowerVR SGX 530MHz form Imagination Technologies. It’s has a third co-processor, the EMS320C64x running at 430 MHz to run its camera, telephony, audio processing and data transmission functions that usually eat main CPU processing in other smartphones.
But more than that, it’s the new Maemo 5.0 OS that serves as the main driving software that allowed Nokia to bring its PC-like internet tablet technologies and multitasking abilities into the smartphone. A seamlessly integrated Mozilla Firefox is your default browser which also supports Adobe Flash 4.0. You get true multi-tasking that allows you to go from one phone app to another or to different website without ever existing – multitasking features we’ve come to expect from desktop and laptop PCs.
Media Power
Multimedia prowess has long been a feature in the Nokia N series, and the N900 tops them all with a brilliant 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen having a 16:9 aspect ratio on a wide-VGA resolution supporting 16 million colors. Modern movies in this aspect fill up the entire screen for a satisfying movie watching experience while on the road. The famous Nokia imaging is here with its 5 megapixel autofocus camera using Carl Zeiss optics.
You can geo-tag images taken with its integrated GPS/A-PS feature bundled with Ovi Maps. There’s Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack. There’s stereo FM as well to provide listening pleasure anytime.
Mobile Internet Experience
Apart from its PC-like Mozilla browser and 3G internet browsing speeds, you also get wireless broadband speeds up to 54 Mbps from its WiFi 802.11b/g feature that gives you access to WiFi signal. Emailing becomes a breeze as Nokia N900 combines into one view your inbox content from as many as 10 different email client accounts.
Availability
Officially launched last September after months of online speculation, the new smartphone is expected to hit European markets by the end of November in time for the holidays. At a SIM-free price of ?499, you know you’re getting your money’s worth with upscale features typical of flagship smartphones in this class.