N900 Videos

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.

Two Nokia employees introduce us to the N900 in this pre-release video.

Jussi Mäkinen is Marketing Manager for the Maemo Devices division. He promotes the N900 as having equivalent technology to a desktop computer, and shows its panoramic desktop, with four desktops set up with widgets for friends, daily schedule, shortcuts, and music.

Jussi shows us how to access the various applications through the dashboard, a screen which shows all of the current multitasking applications, running live in thumbnail windows. With one click you can access this dashboard and with a second click you can switch to another app, or to any of your open web pages.

Jussi then shows us the Flash 9.4 player being used to stream music from a music blog. He’s browsing on a 3G network using the MicroB mozilla-based browser. Pressing on a switcher icon changes from full-screen mode to a view that includes the address bar.

Swiping your finger from the left-hand edge of the screen brings up a mouse cursor, which can be used like a mouse on a home computer to highlight text, display tool-tips etc. This overcomes the usual limitation of touch-screens which can only be used to register mouse clicks but not mouse moves.

Swiping from the right brings up the browser history. You can browse through miniature web pages from your browsing history, then tap the one you want.

Jussi then shows two ways to zoom in and out. Either you can double-tap on the web page, or you can move your finger in a spiral motion—clockwise to zoom in and anti-clockwise to zoom out. Spiral zooming looks a bit odd, because at first the whole web page moves with your finger in a spiral direction. Then, when the N900 realises what you’re doing it starts to zoom instead.

Quim Gil is the open source advocate at Maemo Devices. He takes a picture, then crops it on the device before adding some tags. The inbuilt GPS adds the geotagging.

Jussi shows the N900 playing a movie, and claims that you can do “all the things that you can do on your desktop computer” and reminds us that the device is always with you in your pocket.