Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

I guess this then highly depends on the country. For instance in Finland it's often vice versa: you can get a flat rate data deal, while the vast majority of deals have a per-message price for SMS/MMS (and MMS being higher in price). Which of course makes email/IM much more attractive than MMS usage.

I for instance have a flat rate 3g data for 10 euros per month.

SMS and MMS in general are liked by the operators because of their monetization opportunities: data becomes much more expensive when you turn that into 'MMS data'.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

in addition to everthing that's already been said here:

MMS, like SMS, will make my phone ring/beep/vibrate/... immediately, right after the sender hit the button. email would need to be push-email for this. now given the fact that many handsets don't even support email (or the owner never configured email properly), how many do push email??

it's a different kind of content that goes into MMS. things I want to share now and that have no relevance at all 20mins later.

example?

a friend of mine is single and searching - searching so hard we can't help but make fun of it. - the other week i spotted a group of men in a café that i thought would be interesting for her, so I sent her some pictures by MMS. because it was MMS, she received it instantly and asked for a close up of one of the guys. she got that plus a short video. then she noticed that there was another guy at a table behind them, and she got another picture. etc. etc.

we must have exchanged ~30-50 messages this afternoon, at least 10 of which were MMS with images/videos attached.

that wouldn't have been possible with mail - given that she wasn't home and doesn't have push-mail, she would have seen my first mail only hours later. no way to say "oh, please give me a close-up" then.

it's a different quality. it's not only that you get the data through, it's also about when and how it's presented at the other end.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Same here. 10 EUR flat rate 3G data. 10 EUR flat rate SMS. I know which one I picked... :)

And honestly, I don't see why MMS would be free or cheap when max speed is GPRS...

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

MMS !
here in North Europe ( Scandinavia) I would grade MMS..........yesterday.
too expensive and I never use it, why when I can email or file transfer for FREE when using my ( turbo)3G account. but I can understand that MMS can play a role in areas where Mobile Broadband is not yet all over the place, or the receiver not having email in the mobile device.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Most plans I've looked at comes with X amount of free SMS/MMS (usually within the same provider, some to all). And I can say for sure none of my friends got push email configured on their phones, which is why I prefer MMS, and I use it several times a week. (The circle of friends without push is students at the closest thing we got to computer science here at the Royal Institute of Technology :P)
Most do have email on their phones, but as I said, without push. :(

Also, what provider gives you unlimited data for a reasonable price here in .se? :+

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Please contribute .se information in http://wiki.maemo.org/Data_plans :)

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Give me push email any day :P. Me and my partner have blackberries, and we just send emails throughout the day, or instant message. One of the main reasons I'm considering the N900 is its "always on" status. I can get an exchange account for gmail and that's push email, or use imap-idle protocols and get the semi push mail (about 15-40 seconds slower than push). It also allows for always on instant messaging.

I send about 1 message (sms) per week. I really have no need. All my friends have push email or instant messaging on their phone. So I send hundreds of emails a day (or IMs) and make about 1 phone call a day. I'm very data intensive. I think the N900 will make a great "always on" companion! (Blackberry is the best for this, but its OS is SOOO aged, I hate looking at it.) As long as I can get through a day with a battery (or 2) even with GPRS, I'll be happy. I recently turned on the 3G on my blackberry and I get about 6 hours of texting / chatting. Let's see how long I can get with the N900. I do get 14 days trial :) I doubt it'll disappoint me.


But I would like to have some portrait pages (like calendar, messages and web browsing) as many times I'm walking and I just take a look at the phone to check to see if I have messages even though I have no interest in answering. Or I'm walking and I want to see where I have to go, or verify a time.

Other than that, as long as the phone part keeps a stable connection, and receives calls and SMS I'm happy :)

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Hey, nice resource ..especially for comparing restrictions!

I made a minor update to the Germany section

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Thats prety cool. I like the nice nifty things which have gone into the Maemo software. I guess this is what makes Maemo special.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Does the current process get some sort of "incoming call" notification? For instance, if you're playing Bounce when a call comes in, will Bounce automatically pause?

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Shouldn't that be the game that programs that in? Because I don't see ANY benefit of multitasking the game with the game still working. I imagine that if you pull up the task switcher the game will pause (or I hope).

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

All of the normal apps at least, yes. I haven't tried Bounce specifically, it might be a special case because of its fancy graphics (or then not).

The incoming call notification is a dialog on top of the current app.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

The thing I saw from this review was:

An average user (not a Nokia fan) found out about the N900. Liked what they saw, were very excited to get the N900. Realizes that this is more than just a phone. Goes to see it in person / touch use it.

After playing with it, has some "trouble" (getting call screen up) with it, Nokia rep is no help. Finds out some other info (no MMS), etc. Walks away with a feeling of "can wait" instead of previous "can't wait"!

That isn't good. It doesn't matter what we here think or what Nokia thinks. Or what tricks or shortcut we know. Or what we think appropriate use cases are. If the average user who was interested enough to go play with it (we're not talking about someone who heard about it for the first time when they saw it in the store) comes away feeling "meh" then perhaps a target was missed or overlooked. Yes, this is only step 4 of 5, but shouldn't step 4 have a little more positive reaction?

Based on that, I'd think there may be a lot of returns or slower than expected sales, which should translate into quicker/deeper price drops. Makes waiting a little longer look more attractive.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

I'm not asking about how the notification is presented to the user - I trust that, whatever you may be doing, the notification will be displayed to you.

I'm asking whether the application itself knows that it's being interrupted and can do something intelligent in response to that interruption (automatically pausing, for instance).

I assume the answer is "yes" - something like a generic "lost focus" window manager event - but I was actually surprised on the demo videos to see Bounce keep running even after the user had switched away from it to the dashboard. I would have expected it to realize that it no longer had focus and pause itself.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Well, I think they can... For instance if you have a media player and a song/video playing, this playback pauses.

But it's actually a feature, not a bug, that the app can be running even when it is in the Dashboard. Pausing always everything that loses focus wouldn't also make sense.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

That may not always be the case.

A Youtube video playing in browser will also not pause when you switch away fro the browser to the dashboard.
If I recall, a video does show Youtube still playing in the dashboard view of the browser.

So such intelligence can not be built in unless its factored into the application itself and not always on an OS level.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Looks almost like I wrote this...we have a very similar user profile.
I don't really know if I do not have "true" Push emails, but I get my emails all the time on my very old N95, most times quicker than on my lap top.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

This particular user is technically inclined, and hasn't used Nokia products for several years.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

What if you and a buddy are playing an online multi-player shoot'm up game and he's calling so the two of you can collaborate by voice? If you pause, you're dead. Also, if the hardware and low-level software were done well, the phone call could have a very small performance impact if you were playing the game over WiFi.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

That's kind of what I'm getting at. Back in the day, when it first was available from my provider I thought it was a wondeful idea. Camera phones were just becoming popular and being able to "see what someonw else saw" would be a huge plus for me in my job...

...then reality set in. Some of the older phones in our system were not able to receive MMS and the camera's that were available on the ones that could were so low in resolution a voice or text discription of a problem was actualy more accurate. Even if a high res pictire could be transmitted, the service providor would sometimes only send a text with a link to their web server because the image was to large.

Anybody else that I would send an MMS message to outside of my network would usually bizatch at me for the $.25 (cents) they had to pay for recieving a dang message that they couldn't view.

Ironicaly one of the most frequent uses of my N8**'s are to cirmcumvent provider MMS systems. If someone wants to send me an image from a high quality camera phone, that phone (and the N900) has e-mail capabilities, so they send it to me that way. I use my device to read and view attachments to my e-mail while I'm in the field.
Any pictures that I take while in the field, I BT transfer to the N8**'s, then send them as e-mail attachments tethered to my phones GPRS connection.

As I said the decision to go this route was made some time ago so I asked the question to see if any of the variables had changed.

Good review btw mhammo. Welcome aboard.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

It would be terrible if it were at the OS level - if apps are automatically suspended when you switch away from them, then you really don't have multitasking.


When the call comes in, unless you've set up some sort of hands-free auto-accept, you're going be taken out of the game for some period of time. In the case of a multiplayer game, pausing probably isn't an option, so special incoming-call action would happen. Even if pausing were possible (an RTS, perhaps) and the game auto-paused, nothing says you couldn't switch out of the phone interface back to your game and resume play while talking at the same time.

I'm not at all concerned about resources - system, network, or otherwise - but rather about "I've almost got that high score ... a few more seconds ... RIIINNNGGG .... NOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!!!!!"

The question of music players is also an interesting one. We know the system music player will properly handle incoming calls (i.e. by pausing the music), so since this is an open system, there must be a way for third-party music players to get that same user-is-on-a-call notification (dbus, maybe?).

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Haha sorry, sorry. Graduate school and my 4 hr commute is getting to me.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Bounce needs a lot of work atm. It doesn't pause at all and accidentally touching the screen (or a hardware button) takes you back to the main menu of the game. So, while this hasn't happened to me yet, I'm expecting that an incoming call would exit the current play and take you back to the menu.

Tim

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Does the headphones that the device come with have any media remote (ie play, pause, fast forward, ect) control capabilities.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

That's kind of my point. If a more technically inclined user is having issues, imagine a non-technically inclined user. Having someone who is more technically inclined be very excited, then after using the device change their opinion down to "I'll wait and see" from "I want in now!", to me this indicates it may be slow to be adopted, or get a lot of returns.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

I don't think any of us non-Nokians know that right now. But, since the N900 has A2DP, you can easily find a plethora of third-party Bluetooth headphones that possess these buttons.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

included headset per Nokia N900 specs

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Granted, I haven't seen a phone-call-while-doing-something-else demo, but I'm hoping the n900 doesn't work the way you suggest. If I'm playing a game, reading, or typing away, and a call comes in, I'm hoping that one of the options is that a translucent dialog appears to let me ignore or accept with a keyboard shortcut. If I accept the call, what is the n900 going to cut away to? The two parties just start talking and I keep killing bad guys, but maybe now they've changed their howling death cries to a helpless whimper.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

A2DP on its own isn't enough, it just transfers audio. However AVRCP is also claimed to be supported.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

As I understand it, this.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Even if I'm just answering a call? That seems unlikely. I can certainly switch over to the phone app if I want to, but I shouldn't be forced over there to just answer a voice call.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

I'd still like to know what happens when I have to incoming calls: 1 via cellular, 1 via SIP at the same time (ie from Google Voice forward).

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

This End Call button looks dangerously near to the Speaker button...

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

It does, but don't get hung up on it...

(Sorry, couldn't resist :D)

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

If you have one ongoing call that's a cellular call for example, then you get an incoming call via SIP and you answer it, it puts the cellular call on hold and you can switch back and forth from the cellular call to the SIP call. It's easy to switch back and forth calls as there's an "on hold" strip at the top of the screen which you can press on.

hope this helps.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

It sounds like someone has a prototype ;) how's the battery life :D?

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

Hmm pycage's point about it being close is alarming. Though given that it's resistive, depending on sensitivity hopefully an ear wouldn't hang it up. I imagine the iPhone with its capacitative screen doesn't have that problem.

As for daperl's comment, I agree you should be able to answer the phone and have it stay in that process window. No need to switch over to the phone menu (but still have it open as a background task).

As for the game, yeah I think there should be an option for application pausing (not OS level because then you just have an iPhone like result). But for things like Bounce to have it pause on loss of screen focus. Obviously for multiplayer games we couldn't do that or it would be abused.

But then again a background telephone process wouldn't be to bad since the game would remain focused.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

That why, like the iPhone, it has a proximity sensor to turn off the screen and touchscreen when it's up against your face. . . .

Um, yeah, capacitive doesn't even require contact to sense input. If this were an issue (which it's not on either device thanks to the proximity sensor), capacitive would have it much worse than resistive.

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

That's what I meant. If the iPhone doesn't have the problem of shutting off when it senses an electrical circuit (from your ear) then I can't imagine it being an issue for the n900 which requires pressure on its resistive touch screen. Not unless you slam it against your ear. Good news on the proximity detector though (what does it detect? o.O)

Re: My Hands On Experience with N900
 

It doesn't sense an electrical circuit (since that's essentially what the screen does to sense touch), it has a little IR LED and a receiver. When the IR bounces off your face and into the receiver it knows that there's an object close by (face, pocket, purse, whatever).

It's basically a miniaturized version of the IR beams they have on some electronic keyboards and synthesizers.