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Hands-on the Nokia N900 at CTIA Fall 2009

By: , IntoMobile
Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 10:06 AM

nokia-n900-hands-on-11CTIA Fall 2009 isn’t the biggest show we’ve ever been to. In fact, this particular conference might be the smallest CTIA we’ve ever attended. But, that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of cool hardware to ogle on the showfloor. Take the Nokia N900 for example. It’s Nokia’s latest Nseries smartphone, and the first of the Nseries lineup to run a non-Symbian OS. Nokia tapped its Maemo development team to craft a version of the Linux-based operating system for the new Nokia N900 smartphone, and we have to say it’s light-years better than S60. Say what you want about Symbian, just don’t say it’s “good.”

Anyway, enough ranting about Symbian. The Nokia N900 is a true multi-tasking powerhouse. The N900 is powered by the same 600Mhz ARM Cortex A8 processor that you’ll find crunching numbers inside the iPhone 3GS. Nokia uses that awesome processor to bring serious multi-tasking to the Nokia N900. Take a look at the video below and you’ll see that the N900 we were playing with was running no less than six apps at the same time – no saved-state nonsense, this was legitimate multi-tasking. One of the apps (a game) even displayed an animated thumbnail showing the game in action while running in the background.

The UI is smooth and lag-free. Flick your finger on the touchscreen and you’ll be treated to a bit of kinetic scrolling. Maemo 5 supports widgets too, which means you can fill your three homescreen panes with all sorts of little info-windows that pull social-network information in real-time. And, as an added bonus, Maemo 5 runs a Mozilla-based web browser that boasts full Flash 9.2 support. This isn’t the crappy Flash Lite that some folks have been saying is a good alternative to real Flash support (even though it really isn’t). This is real Flash, running real fast and real smoothly.

As for the hardware, here’s a quick rundown. The Nokia N900 features a 3.5-inch WVGA capacitive resistive touchscreen, 5-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera (with dual-LED flash), 32GB onboard storage, 3G data, GPS, WiFi, FM radio and that speedy 600Mhz Cortex A8 processor. In a nutshell, it’s everything you’d expect from Nokia’s latest Nseries flagship.

You can pre-order the Nokia N900 from NokiaUSA.com for $649. Have at it!

Enjoy the video.

Hands-on the Nokia N900 from IntoMobile.

[Update]
Touchscreen is resistive, not capacitive

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • zymo

    It isn’t a capacitive touchscreen, it’s resistive.

  • A.T.

    let’s do some fact checking

    Maemo5 is not a phone but a software, like Karmic Koala

    N900 is not a smartphone but *mobile computer with phone capability* (with lack of shorter term yet), and smartphones are those Nxx and Exx

    you’ve gotta have some more attention when pals talk.

  • reidan

    Why resistive touchscreen? Isn’t old technology?

  • Ricardo

    Hey! Nice article! I have a question, how do you create the effect to share the article? I mean, the action where you can use the mouse to spread the your article to the social media like facebook, twitter and other medium. Thanks in advance.

  • Jimmy

    Can this phone withstand the humdity weather in the tropical country.The phone may have a lot of function, but if it can’t take the humdity, don’t bring it into tropical country and later void the warranty just like my N97.