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.

Mikko Korpelainen is a Senior Product Manager at Nokia, and he seems particularly proud of what he calls the “mighty Maemo browser”, and the full internet experience that it offers on a pocket-sized device.

The Maemo browser supports the “latest web technologies” which in practice means the Gecko rendering engine (as also used in Firefox and Fennec) plus “full Flash support” (which means version 9.4 at this time).

Performance is important, so that the device is responsive, pages load fast, and frame rates are good. Scrolling certainly looks fast on the video.

Screen real estate is precious, and as usual in these demos the New York Times home page is used to show off how efficient the N900’s Maemo browser is.

Next we see a demonstration of the browser’s “manipulation modes”: hover and select. These modes enable the browser to be used like a desktop mouse-driven browser.

Martin Schüle takes over and shows some “tips and tricks”: smooth panning, double-tap to zoom, spiral zoom in and zoom out. He slides out the keyboard, types in a URL, and loads up YouTube across a 3G connection. From YouTube, he plays a Miley Cyrus video, and it looks pretty smooth.

By swiping from the right we see the browser history as a row of thumbnails and can easily revisit a previous page. Finally, Martin shows us copy-and-paste using the familiar control-C and control-V keyboard commands that we know from desktop computers.

We are shown how to move around the open web pages using the multitasking dashboard, and how to click to add a browser bookmark or a shortcut to the desktop.

The Maemo browser (MicroB) looks great, and is in my opinion the first mobile browser to provide the “full internet experience”.

Jussi Mäkinen is the Marketing Manager for the Maemo Devices division of Nokia. In this TNB video he gives an extensive tour of the device.

Jussi consistently refers to the N900 as a mobile computer rather than a phone, and stresses that it runs the Maemo operating system.

First we see the four home screens from the panoramic desktop, all laden with widgets including several that are scrolling, auto-updating. Clicking on a “contact” widget brings up all of the contact methods for that person (phone, email, skype, IM, twitter…). The dashboard shows all of the open applications: contacts, bookmarks, chat etc.

Next we see the context-sensitive menus, and a demonstration of movie playback. The 5MP camera has a widescreen aspect ratio. We see Jussi taking a photo, which gets automatically geotagged and added to the gallery. From there it can be shared by email, bluetooth, or online services such as Ovi, FaceBook and Flickr.

With heavy usage, Nokia aims for one full day of battery life.

The web browser features kinetic scrolling, double-tap to zoom in/out, or alternatively spinning to zoom. A mouse pointer can be brought up by swiping in from the left. As it is moved across the screen it “hovers”, bringing up the display of tooltips. You can “click the mouse” by using the space bar on the keyboard. An on-screen icon changes the mouse pointer to active, enabling text to be selected.

YouTube videos can be played in context, embedded on the web page, using the Flash 9.4 player. When you go to the task switcher, you can still see the video running in the thumbnail, together with your other multitasked applications.

Jussi said the N900 was coming out in October 2009 for 500 Euros plus tax. As we now know, it didn’t make that date.

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).