N900 Videos

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”.