Hello all

I'm just after a little bit of extra information about the Nokia N900. Currently I'm thinking about buying one - my current phone is a Nokia C6.

Reason I'm thinking about changing? The N900 looks pretty good and it dosen't appear to repeat the hardware problems of the N96 (very sloooow and unstable, crashes at least once a week) and my current C6 (Hardware is much better than the N96 but the software is appaling - try installing *any* piece of software and it's a chore having to fight through certificates and dates x.x ). Even then most stuff (assuming you can find anythng!) dosen't install/run properly. So much for Symbian^1.

Only thing that concerns me though is what I've read about the N900's fragile USB port. What is the current situation with it - and if mine breaks should I get one (e.g. from amazon.co.uk ) would it be replaced? And what if it broke again? And again? Surely a phone with such a fragile USB connector would be almost unusable?

I've read about people filing down the connector on the N900's USB cable but that also seems worrying - a brand new phone and (ok admittably the cable) you have to take a file to it?!

Also what is the battery life of the N900 like? (Currently the C6 works with minimum usage for about 1 week). From what I've read googling it seems to be quite confusing, reviews range from 'appling' to 'amazing' or so it seems x.x !

thanks

ljones

Out of the phones I handle (3) none of them ever had any usb problems and I never modified them. I still love my n900, and so does my gf.

it really depends on what you want, if you wan't loads of apps/games you'll be dissapointed, it does have a lot of apps but not as many as most other phone os's
however it is a fantastic device.
in my experience having one since march, its only ever crashed once so its very stable, it has flash 9 support so you get the full web experience (ish) it needs an upgrade to flash 10.1 but we don't know if its coming.
although it has almost no games, you can download emulators and play all the classic N64, PS1, MegaDrive and GameBoy games.

it has support for live wallpapers like you see on android phones

the cpu can be over clocked

there's too much to list really but coming from an N95 8GB and an N97, its so much better

I agree with matthew, it's not just a smart phone, it's is a portable computer.
There is my points:

- If you want real applications, don't want to pay for then it's perfect.

- Another really nice feature is the camera, see the photos bellow, I will not lie, without good light condition photos are not that good, see some bellow...

- Video recording in good light conditions is good too, se some with low light... with good light I have one, but not on you tube (http://www.youtube.com/user/Alektovideos#p/u (watch in HD please)).

- Audio quality from video and recorder program is the best I have seen...

- N900 have the finest mobile browser I ever tested, with working falsh 9, and working tweak do 10.1

- Unfortunately is not multi touch

- Battery life is normal, nothing different from others... My phone can maintain battery for 5-7 days without use, but I charge it, 2 or 3 times a day (very hard use of 3G, there is no wifi in everywhere in brazil, all day chating in MSN, skype and gtalk and facebook) or 2 days listening 4 hour of music a day and some short calls

- N900 has hundreds of apps, 99% of extras and 90% of extras-devel application realy work... and that is good, because this repository have too many app. (guessing the numbers)

- Not too much action games, board games are good, emulators and ports are too...

- Upnp feature is nice, works with videos

- you can install extras codecs and subtitle support, they work nicely great, most of movies and series that you rip/download works without re-encode/conversion

- e-mail application, works, but not the best, for me it's OK, some people complain...

- Maps work nicely, but only on line and no navigation (yet, I think)

- PDF reader is nice, works with any PDF i tested, there is evince PDF reader too, very nice features, but chraches with too large PDF's

- Opera browser for one hand navigation is a peace of cake, very nice, works in beta like final version, best portrait navigation ever, but no flash and poor images quality in exchange of velocity, I use it basicaly to read news and blogs.

- New panorama app from nokia really works, see example bellow (last photo)

- Overclock is great, but not realy necessary

- Office file view is OK, but you have to pay, there is free office that do the work well, but paid is better

- Gnumeric works nicely to view an edit sheets

- abiword works great

- Google docs works OK, best to view file on line

- CBR pager is nice to read comics and mangas...

- Gpoder is the best pod cast client I ever tested

- Mobile hotsopt shares 3G connectivity anywhere you go, some bugs, but an IP refresh and it came back.

- Some VNC clients to access you computer from home (i want log me in, but....)

- there is an IT calculator, if you study anything with mathematics, you will save some good money

There is much more, this is what I use every week at least... lol

If you want any more explanations feel free to ask :P











Panorama

I've had my N900 for almost 2 weeks now, and I love it, though haven't used it as much as I've wanted to. In addition to what was written above WRT apps (especially games), you should know a few things:

1. Being mostly open, the N900 generally far expandable in what you can do versus Android and Apple. No jailbreaking is required! In addition, as you have direct control of the device's Flash storage, you can re-partition it however you want, so you can add swap, more program storage, etc. A combined 48 GB is supported between the internal 32 GB and a 16 GB uSD card; a 32 GB uSD card has been developed by Samsung, but I have no idea if the N900's hardware uSD interface can handle it.

2. Easy Debian is available for other platforms, but it REALLY shines on the N900 because of the above. Easy Debian gives you a full-blown Linux distribution running semi-virtualized underneath Maemo: if it will run under ARM, it will run here. Using Easy Debian, people have got wireless printing running, Open Office, the GIMP (open Photoshop clone), and even--recently--Wine, the Windows-not-emulator, which should dramatically help with gaming needs on things that don't eat a lot of processor time (because x86 needs to be translated/emulated to ARM).

3. The N900, even if discontinued, has a future because even if Nokia decides they won't make a native MeeGo for it, the community WILL! Also, you're not limited to some app store thanks to Easy Debian as well as the always (yes, even now!) growing list of native Maemo apps. I believe that the compilers are even working natively under Maemo now (i.e., not under Easy Debian) so you can work on your own app on the device without using an emulator on some other machine.

I bought the N900 because of reason #3. I have no idea if Nokia or anyone else will *EVER* release a device as open as this one again--only the OpenMoko Freerunner was more open, though less capable hardware-wise--so I jumped on it when I saw it was apparently discontinued. It's not quite the netbook/laptop replacement I'd hoped (yet) due to tiny screen (800x480 sized down like that make for *TINY* pixels!) and lack of USB host mode (which has almost been conquered by a very dedicated team), but it's very close and you won't find anything else remotely like it once you see just how much you can actually do with it...provided you're a computer power-user, of course, and not just an appliance operator that just clicks icons. (This is the reason, IMHO, this device really isn't meant for the masses: this is for us, the geeks!)

Hope this helps,

Mike

The one issue with battery life is there's a glitch in one of the built-in applications - "hildon-desktop". If certain conditions happen, the thing is -always- running at a low level, eating battery life at a high rate.
Fortunately, there's a patched version of it that fixes the problem entirely, and can be installed easily in a minute or so. Once that's installed, battery life is always good and tends to be predictable.

The N900's a great machine, but -- as people have noted -- some of the software has glitches and or missing functionality(But what -doesn't-?). Being very open, however - There are fixes, updates and 3rd-party apps which solve all those problems.

All intresting stuff and thanks for the help here! So in the end I ended up getting the N900 after all; I've literally only had it for a day or two now.

All seems well though that little thing in the back of my mind about the USB connector breaking still concerns me x.x !

ljones

So it definitely definitely better than an N97 then? I'm thinking of getting an N900 and selling my N97.

I think that battery life is now (after PR1.3) much better than ealier.

Z

the battery life is a bit worse than C5 has. but I don't surf the net for hours per day with C5 usually so N900's battery lasts a day and C5's battery a week with little spotify streaming.