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.

There are many contexts in Maemo 5 where it’s not necessary to click on anything before you start typing. The simple act of typing brings up an appropriate function. Some examples of this powerful form of keyboard input are shown in this video by Sanna of Nokia’s Maemo 5 User Interface team.

From any of the four home screens, just start typing to search for a contact. This opens a panel showing the matching contacts. As soon as you have typed enough characters to narrow down your search, just touch the contact name, then touch an option such as “Call with Skype”.

Also from a home screen you can start entering a phone number. This needs the function key because there’s no separate numeric row on the N900 keyboard. Entering a number brings up the dial pad, from which you can dial the number. Or, you can click on the menu to create a new contact using that number.

In the media player, when all the tracks are displayed, just start typing to locate matching songs. Touch the one you want, and it plays.

If you’re looking at the main conversations view, you can find old conversations with a contact. Just start typing to search back through previous conversations (SMS/IM).

In the calendar view, just start typing the title of an event and the “New event” dialog will open to accept your input. This is a little different from the other cases where “just typing” brings up a search-like function, but nevertheless it seems to work smoothly.

It all looks pretty good. If you’ve got a hardware keyboard on your phone, you may as well be able to use it to save some time.