Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

guys how long do you think is this device's lifetime? As in how long until Nokia pulls support for it and the community moves on to MeeGo? Since MeeGo's not coming to the N900, I guess Nokia will have to support it's newest OS instead of Maemo. Do you think it's worth buying and that it'll last (from a support perspective) for two or three years?

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

The N900 was just introduced in some major markets like India. They wouldn't do that if it was about to be discontinued or forgotten. At the very least Nokia will have to support it through the warranty period of the last ones sold. And it's well known that the N900 will get at least one more sgnificant update, PR 1.3.

I fully intend to use mine for at least a couple more years.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

What about applications? Are you confident that applications will keep coming for this device?
Plus, since I'm looking for a net browsing and multimedia device, do you think it would be better to buy an iPod Touch or a netbook instead of the N900?

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

The former will not give you a desktop-like browsing experience, the latter is not as portable. You just have to work out your priorities. As for the applications thing, it is all relative. If you expect this to be like the iPhone with thousands upon thousands of applications (even if of limited use) you should look for something else.

Same here. Unless I either accidentally destroy it or something else comes out with some feature I find to be of critical importance to me, I will stick with it.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Definitely not. The iPhone App Store is populated with dozens of flashlight and lightsabre apps. I just want functional, usable apps that bring the N900 closer to an actual computer (i.e. RAR unpackers, torrent apps, compression tools, b/t keyboard and mouse support) and I'm only worried if those exist or if useful apps such as these will cease to come in the future.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Well, most of those are already there, so unless they get broken you should be fine already :)

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

If the N900 is going to be your main browsing device, you might not be happy. It's great for a smartphone and if I were traveling for a while it would be enough but for the money you might be better off with a cheaper phone and a netbook.

I don't think an iPod Touch would be that much better than the N900. There's almost as much space for media on the Nokia and it has a keyboard and camera. Most recent phones, even cheap ones, double as decent music players, anyway.

Apps are another story. Is there something you think you can't live without? Certain games that have specific clients? Word processing or programming needs? I think you said you were a student so the larger screen and storage, as well as usb peripherals might be the wiser choice.

I gave my daughter my netbook but I still have access to desktops at home and work, as well as an old laptop so I don't miss it. But being dependent on one device for internet, phone, media, etc. seems workable only if you are extremely motivated and prepared to risk being without anything if you drop your phone, or it's stolen or whatever.

It's good that you weigh the options. Maybe the MeeGo netbook, when it comes out? :-)

Terry

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Max two years as any mobile

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

If you even consider a Apple device, go get one.

N900 is for specially interested folks only, Apple are for you grandmother even.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

6/10/2010 9:29:00 PM
Two OMAP 3430 Phones: Nokia N900 and Motorola Droid

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3764/t...otorola-droid/


Final Words
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3764/t...orola-droid/22

"When I sat down to tackle the N900, I was hugely excited because of how much potential Maemo still has as it evolves into MeeGo. A month later, I still feel the same way - like I've explored maybe 10% of the platform's real depth. There's something to be said for how truly and completely open Nokia's approach is compared to platforms like Android and iOS. For as big on 'open' as these latter two platforms advertise being, it's refreshingly mindblowing to see Nokia offering instructions on how to get superuser access on their own handset, on their own support website. Contrast that to iOS or Android where one has jailbreak or 'root', respectively, to do things the platform creators don't intend. To that end, I find it incredibly depressing when the Linux chief architect himself, Linus Torvalds, (who is notably Finnish, same as Nokia) embraces Android over Maemo. It's the difference between a platform that lets you fire up a preinstalled X-Term and apt-get install away versus one that doesn't. While that's not really an end-user feature that any handset maker will tout, it's telling about platform philosophy."

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

I am an SEO and web developer and so I will answer the part about the browser.

The n900 has the best online browser of any mobile phone or tablet BY FAR.

I tested the compatibility of the browser in many hard to handle pages. I owned and used Iphone, Ipad, G1 ( android ) and many HTC devices. So I am talking with real experience in mobile browsers here.

It will load and display complex AJAX pages that Iphone users can only DREAM of seeing in years.

After pr 1.2 the keyboard got much more usable by using long clicks.

So I would recommend this phone.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Thanks for understanding my dillemma :)

In some ways the N900 almost seems too good for me. If the money was in my hands I'd impulse buy it immediately. The thought of browsing (nearly) the full web, listening to my music, downloading stuff via BitTorrent, watching movies thanks to the enormous storage and using it as a phone seems like an amazingly exciting prospect. It'd be so much more portable (and modular) than a netbook if I could whip out a bluetooth keyboard, connect a TV cable and use it just as I would a normal netbook.

However, this thing is costing me near $560 in my country. I'm getting a pretty well specified notebook here - which I admit isn't as portable - for $200 more. (I assume you're in the US, so using local currency)

For that extra $200 I put obsolescence completely at bay since laptops usually last six or seven years from a technical standpoint, get around 15 times more storage and all the flexibility of a PC, except the portability. And that alone is crucial to me. I cannot bear to live with my Nokia E90's browsing and MP3 playback on it's 330MHz processor for longer, and since this is my last major purchase for quite some time, I'll have to live with it a few years more. The N900 would be my internet browser, music player, plaything and utility device, but buying a laptop would mean buying all of those separately.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Thanks for your input.
By the way, having used all of those devices, how do you feel about the screen size? Having the full web experience is useless without adequate screen size, so do you think the N900 is easy to browse on with regards to the screen?

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

You can get arrowed directions in OVI by clicking the arrow pointer as of PR1.2. Re-route is not a simple option though. Mappero (a community navigator) has all these features though, and is free. Re-route is an option when setting the route, has voice guidance, etc. And Sygic is also available.

I used my N6230 for over 6 years. Most mobiles are capable of quite a long life span if you buy them matching your projected needs. Since the N900 is so configurable, I expect to use mine for at least 4 or 5 years. The only way that would change is if GSM goes away for some reason, which I highly doubt will happen.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Well, a netbook in the US will usually cost a little more than half of what the N900 costs. A decent notebook (laptop) is what I'm assuming you estimate would be $200 more.

If it were me, I think I'd buy a smartphone like the HTC Fuze or Tilt 2 (WinMo) or Motorola Cliq (Android) or even a cheap G1 or Nokia 5800, which have all dropped to a couple of hundred dollars and buy a nice netbook for around $300. That way you wouldn't have all of your eggs in one basket.

But if you did go with an N900, I think you could make it work. It just will take some doing, since you'll have to buy accessories and wait until some things like external keyboards are more common.

Let us know how it turns out.

Terry

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

I can only second ehab: The maemo browser is top notch, it correctly displays pages that I wouldn't have dared visit with neither iPhone nor XPeria. Also, with the new onscreen keyboard, at least to me, typing feels more natural than with either one (never got used to the iPhone keyboard at all, and the onscreen keyboard of the XPeria is far too small to comfortably use it without the stylus - the hardware one feels slightly superior to the N900, though).

So I'd say, at least for my taste and my diverse needs the N900 offers the best support in it's size category.

If we're talking about comparing it to a netbook, it's not that easy, though.

I can only share my own experiences, and those right now include having sent in my netbook for repairs three weeks ago. At first I was about to panic (I'm travelling a lot) but by now I feel comfortable I can live okay with only my N900 for another couple of weeks.

Both have their pro and cons. The N900 of course is more portable, I can actually sit quite well while carrying it in my cargos (with my netbook sitting becomes a bit more of a... stiff experience... ;) ). Also, I just love how I can just take it with me into bed and surf/write while lying on my side (which I'm actually doing right now :D ). And to me there's also that big advantage of how for example while shopping I can just easily use it to look up information without having to look for a place to put it down or balance it on my palm.

Of couse, when I'm spending a whole week or two in a hotel, I definitely prefer having my netbook around. I'm used to turbo-typing with 10 fingers, so of course typing on the N900 still takes five times as long as on the netbook. And of course there's quite a couple of applications that won't run on the N900, but do fine on the netbook.

So I guess browsing the repositories to get a feeling for what kind of application will run on the N900 should be one of the first things to do. Is the hardware's capacity enough for your needs and do you feel that everything you'll need will one day be available for the N900 (considering that this community is very strong at turning requests into actual applications)? With the examples of apps you mentioned earlier and the questions from the first post I dare almost say the N900 should be sufficient.

As for the screen, at least for me, that feels like much less of an issue than the keyboard. Holding the device at arms length I can still easily read almost every website without zoom, only for clicking links I really consider zooming in, and then you can either doubleclick to autozoom or use the volume buttons to finetune the zoom.

But again, that's mostly sharing my own experiences and those might differ from how a non geek might feel about usability and capabiliies of the device.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

I'm most definitely a geek, however I realize that fundamentally I expect as much from the N900 as everyone else does. instead of thinking of it as a typical, average smartphone, I have to understand that it is essentially a powerful box of electronics with an operating system. With this in mind, I have decided to purchase the N900 and sell my E90 (on which I am very comfortably typing this right now) as it seems overall better value than buying a separate laptop, PDA, phone, music player and plaything. The only downgrades I feel might make me hesitate are the screen size and the keyboard. I have already seen from your responses that it is adequate for comfortable browsing; however I do have my reservations about the keyboard.

Did you actually type all this on your N900? I'm essentially migrating from a five-row QWERTY down to a three-row on the N900.
If it's important, I have precise fingers but they are a little chubby.
Here's a comparison: http://my-symbian.com/other/grafika/n900_3.jpg
http://my-symbian.com/other/grafika/n900_2.jpg
http://my-symbian.com/other/grafika/n900_6.jpg
Now do you think it would be easy to switch?

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

There really shouldn't be any problems with chubby fingers - I have them (and mighty long fingernails), too, and I have no problems writing. Not even with the top row, which was my biggest concern because of it's close proximity to the screen.

Also, it' still a perfectly fine QWERTY (well, QWERTZ in my case :D), only the special characters, numbers and the spacebare have been repositioned. I'm already used to only using the right thumb for hitting the spacebar, so that wasn't much of a problem for me, but it might be for someone who's normally using both thumbs for inserting spaces.

I'm still using the onscreen keyboard most of the time (and that's what I was writing that last post with), but that's mostly because right now I spend most of the time on the N900 modifying it, and one of the drawbacks of the hardware keyboard is the limited number of keys. I dearly miss my greater-than and lesser-than keys and the most beautiful round and-sign... ;)

(Yet for normal use it's more than enough. I can't tell what special characters are included with non-German keyboards, but all in all there should be 25 of them.)

Another small drawback is that half of the screen of course is hanging free when the hardware keyboard is open, so I'm a bit cautious when tapping that part. That might just be me, though, as it seems to be rather stable - nothing is moving when I put some pressure on the upper border around the screen.

Well this post was written with the hardware keyboard this time, and I think I was actually typing a bit faster. Still far from the usual a-sentence-a-second on a real keyboard, though. ;)

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

one of the scare tactics that caused me to rethink my plan of buying the n900 was the claim that it is bad in terms of basic phone-functionalities

the truth is: never had any glitch, nokia conversations is excellent (sms/im) and minor flaws like extended call logs can be obtained by using an app. works absolutely great as a phone. that being said there are issues with no multiple profiles, linking certain ringtones to certain people for e.g

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Raubtier is right. The reception is great. For those whose who have problem with it, try a LG phone.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

btw guys does YouTube work on this phone? Or does it not? In that case, is there a YouTube app?
How long do you think YouTube actually will work before they move to Flash 10?

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Yes, just use the regular YouTube site just like you normally would from a desktop or laptop.

I think there is. I've never used it. Don't think you'll need it.

A long time. They won't want to lose the millions of vewers that will still have flash 9 for a long time to come. They're moving to HTML5 anyway.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

YouTube works like a charm, though watching videos in full screen while having 6 other active browser windows open made the poor device gasp for a moment or two... :D
(Worked quite well after that, though.)

Not sure whether there's already an app out there, but I'm sure if ever YouTube decided to switch to Flash 10 (and Maemo still hadn't), there'd instantly spawn a multitude of YouTube apps. ;)

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Again, I'm pretty concerned about buying the device and then ending up at a dead-end with no official Nokia support, several missing smartphone features and a community that - while being amazingly efficient and quick now - will probably have the best devs leaving for the MeeGo platform.

This is a $560 investment. What should I do?
Again, don't mistake me as a simple Average Joe who just needs a normal smartphone and isn't willing to tinker with his phone. I am perfectly willing, it's just that, come on, it's $560.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Eleven pages and no decision. I'd say you probably aren't going to get to a positive one, so perhaps waiting for a meego device is the right thing to do.

As for your points: official Nokia support - what do you want from Nokia in terms of support? There will likely be another firmware release but no more. But support in terms of repair and replacement will go on for some time.

Devs moving to Meego - one of the Meego ideas is developing apps with QT so that they work on Maemo, Symbian and Meego. How this works in real life will be interesting to see, but at least some apps will work across platforms.

But really, I think many people are missing the promise of what the n900 represents.

Imagine if you bought a PC from Dell. And from then on, you had to rely on Dell for updates to your operating system?

People here are concerned that there will be no official Meego for the n900. This actually makes me happy (with many provisos of course). It means that the OS and the hardware vendor are no longer tightly coupled. We look to Meego for updates to Meego, not Nokia.

It would be the best thing ever if all Nokia release are the drivers and closed source blobs (of which it is likely there will always be some) for the n900.

So you get your phone hardware, and you choose your OS - be it android, symbian, maemo, meego - and install your drivers and off you go.

Just like you would with a PC and linux. I want my phone hardware vendor to have less control over my OS, not more. The exact opposite of Apple.

This is the future I am keen to see unfold.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

1. Does Mappero allow downloading maps to the N900 via WiFi or PC first, like Ovi Maps ?
Reason being I'm going to California later this year and would like to pre-load the maps before hand.

2. Does the PDF reader reflow text ?

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Answering my own questions after buying the N900.

Yes, but seems to take a long time. Still figuring this one out.

No, but the hi-res 3.5" screen does allow reading the full width of a PDF without having to side scroll.

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Hey I really wish they had an easy way to do this. But did you happen to read about downloading maps along the route with mappero? My guess is that you are probably using this method...

Re: Some questions before I buy the N900
 

Yep, easiest way is to simply stream the maps as you drive.
With wifi you can pre download the map tiles for just the route you plan to take by pre browsing it as well.