N900 Videos

Engadget reviewed a pre-production N900, after playing with it for a few days. They felt that the form factor was a good compromise between the N810 and the N97, with the N900 being a good size and shape despite its thickness.

The buttons and external controls were then demonstrated: volume, power, camera shutter, lock switch, headphone jack, infra-red window, stereo speakers, micro-USB port, lanyard slot and plastic stylus (which is fairly long and quite usable). There’s a camera with sliding lens cover similar to that of the N97 (but hopefully without the scratching problem), and a kickstand.

The reviewer was impressed by the Maemo 5 interface, finding it clean and powerful, and also fast and smooth due to the power of the N900’s Cortex A8 processor. He commented that the interface was mostly but not completely finger-friendly.

The Qwerty keyboard doesn’t slide far open, and only holds three rows of keys, making it smaller than the keyboards on many of the N900’s competitors. Nevertheless, the reviewer found the keyboard quite usable despite the unusual location of the spacebar and directional pad.

The reviewer pointed out that portrait mode is not properly supported except for the phone, and that Nokia plans to correct that in the future—but that it doesn’t hurt its usefulness as a hacker-friendly device.

The reviewer then makes some disparaging comments about the resistive touchscreen, and demonstrates some difficulty getting his gestures recognised, yet also having one button-press unintentionally recognised. Nevertheless, during the rest of the video his interaction with the screen seems to be fairly effortless and reliable.

The browser is then demonstrated. The reviewer is impressed, and describes it as the most complete browsing experience you can get today: better than the iPhone, Android or the Palm Pre (despite the resistive display!). For people whose primary need is “browsing on the road”, this could be the ideal unit.

And with that, the video is over, with a promise of another review when a production unit is available.

Micky at nokiausers.net reviewed the volume and quality of the sound from the N900’s stereo speakers, and compared it to four other Nokia phones: the N97, 5800 XpressMusic, 5530 XpressMusic and N95-1.

Each device is demonstrated in turn, put in the same place, and the same song is played: “Jump” by Van Halen.

The N95-1 goes first. It’s reasonably loud but sounds a bit distorted to me. The N97 is a bit louder, but sounds perhaps fuzzier. The 5530 sounded cleaner to me, although there’s not much in it. Micky reckons the 5800 is the loudest of the devices, and I think it’s probably the cleanest sounding too.

The N900 is almost as loud, and perhaps just slightly more distorted.

Of course when we listen to this video, we are not hearing just the sound of these phones. The sound quality is further degraded by the microphone on the video camera, and by lossy video encoding, and then again by the speakers on which we’re listening.

Despite that, these phones are all way above average for a mobile device with tiny speakers. And of course you can get much better sound quality with a pair of good headphones, or by using the inbuilt FM transmitter (where available).

Micky likes the 5800, but finds the N97 tinny by comparison. He likes the sound of the N95’s speakers, although he feels the output is lower, and the 5530 is bottom of the bunch in his opinion.

As for the N900, he feels that the sound quality is as good as the 5800 although it’s not quite so loud.

So there you have it, Micky and I perceive some of the results differently, but of course he was listening to them live so I’m happy to take his word for it. Either way, the N900’s stereo speakers are sounding pretty good.

This is a refreshingly different “first impressions” video from MobileDeveloperTV. It’s not some rehearsed fourth take of a fake “unboxing”, but appears to be the genuine first switching on of the device, together with candid comments on what’s happening.

The device is pre-production, a loaner sent to bloggers. You can read all the text on the covering letter from Nokia. It surprised me that a pre-release device would come without at least a pre-release version of the manual, especially since an online version has been floating around on the web for a while.

The first thing to do is to open up the back and put in the battery and SIM card. The reviewer is surprisingly rough with this £450 phone, but then if you’re getting a loaner device you maybe don’t feel the need to be so careful.

The reviewer has a lot of trouble finding out how to switch the device on. Eventually he finds the power button and switches it on, but his USIM from operator “3″ is rejected, so he tries again with a Vodafone SIM card.

We hear the familiar Nokia startup sound and see the creepy “beckoning hands” startup clip, then the initial settings dialog is displayed. Setting the time brings up a sexy analog clock with hands that you can move by finger. It looks great, but is a bit awkward, taking a couple of tries and still being out by one minute.

The date is set by an attractive kinetic rolling interface. On saving the settings he is taken to the initial desktop. There’s an inviting “Get started” button. Pressing on it appears to do nothing, then he tries to move to an different desktop, and the device appears to lock up. But it’s really just loading the startup video.

The video plays some soothing music and shows the main interface elements: the multiple desktops, the application menu button, the web browser, the multitasking dashboard, the contacts screen, the notification area and the menu bar.

More on-device tutorials are available if necessary, but the reviewer is keen to get cracking. Time has run out for YouTube’s 10-minute video length however, so it will have to wait for Part 2.

A worthwhile video, and one from which Nokia’s usability engineers could glean a few tips.

This video, from ubergizmo, shows nothing more than the N900 playing back a Nokia promotional video. As you can see, the playback is flawless.

According to Nokia’s N900 Technical Specifications, the N900 can play back a wide variety of video files (mp4, avi, wmv and 3gp) using these codecs: H264, MPEG4, Xvid, WMV and H263.

To ensure smooth playback:

• ensure that your WiFi or 3G network is fast enough, if streaming or playing from the network
• ensure that you’re not running performance-hogging applications in the background (multi-tasking)
• ensure that the video file is a suitable resolution and frame rate for the device

Bounce Evolution is a 3D graphics game from Rovio which runs quite well on the N900. Your mission is to steer a ball along a torturous course.

You steer the ball (using the accelerometer) and control its speed by tilting the N900. You can also make the ball jump by shaking the phone the correct way.

The frame rate seems reasonable, and the motion seems smooth. In theory, the N900 pushes fewer polygons to the screen per second than the iPhone 3GS (but more than the iPhone 3G), and the N900 has two and a half times as many pixels to paint, but this game doesn’t seem to strain the N900 too hard.

Of course, the N900 has true multi-tasking so you do need to make sure that you don’t have too many things running in the background if you want the game to be highly responsive.

(via ubergizmo)

This video from ubergizmo shows the N900 app launcher being used to start up MicroB, the Maemo web browser that uses the Mozilla rendering engine. A click on a bookmark (with thumbnail image) brings up the ubergizmo website.

As with many websites designed for desktop browsing, the text and images on ubergizmo are unreadably small when displayed on the N900, and there are several ways to zoom in.

Double-tapping on any part of the web page results in that part of the web page being zoomed to fill the width of the screen. This works pretty well. I guess the browser is looking at the width of the enclosing block element in the HTML code. The zooming is not perfect though, as the element does not always quite fill the screen, and sometimes seems offset a little. It’s quite functional though, even if not so smooth and finely-calibrated as the double-tap zoom on the iPhone’s Safari browser.

The second way to zoom in and out is to draw spirals on the screen with your finger: clockwise to zoom in and counter-clockwise to zoom out. This seems tedious compared to “pinch to zoom” on multi-touch screens (the N900’s resistive screen is single-touch), and I think spiral-zoom will get old very fast, although one advantage is that it can (only just!) be done with the thumb while holding the N900 one-handed. The effect is slightly off-putting visually, because the web page starts to pan (move around) before the software sees enough of the gesture to recognise it as a spiral and start zooming.

The third way to zoom is to use the +/- buttons on the top edge of the N900. These are normally used to change the volume, but the web browser uses them for zooming instead. Personally I’d like to be able to use hardware buttons to change the volume on a web page, but it seems this must be done with on-screen controls instead. The button-zooming seems to work well, with a reasonable choice of step size.

The video then shows some more examples of double-tap zooming, including the way the browser interprets double-tap as a “zoom out” command if the page element is already zoomed in. It seems quite usable.

Finally, the screen appears to freeze up and go blank, then the browser starts to open a new window. I’m not sure whether the user accidentally activated some interface element, or whether something went wrong on the device (which we should gracefully ascribe to the pre-production software).

This silent video shows the N900 close-up, to give a good feel for its shape and size, and to show its external features and ports.

The camera slider (lens cover) is marked “Carl Zeiss Tessar 2.8/5.2 AF 5MP”. When slid open, the lens and a dual-LED flash are visible. There’s no Xenon flash. An imprint in the black back of the device reads “NOKIA Nseries”. There is also a small kickstand which deploys from around the camera area, but this was not demonstrated.

Around the edge of the phone are the stereo speakers, a “lock” slider button, 3.5mm headphone jack, microphone opening, micro-USB charging and data port, zoom/volume up/down button, power button and camera shutter. The stylus can be pulled out, or pushed out with a thumb.

We also get a glimpse of the “Camera Mode” dialog, the multi-tasking application switcher, the slide-out keyboard and the application launcher.

(via ubergizmo)