N900 Videos

This thirty-second video from NokiaConversations starts with the ominous sound of a clock ticking.

A guy sits outside his local pub, nursing a cappucino. The pub is the White Hart, which has 22 windows. But his N900 can open more windows than that, no bother.

We see a web browser window, a drawing application, and then the dashboard which is already up to 24 windows “and counting” when the 30-second timer goes off.

Blogger Chris Stobbs took a series of videos of the N900 meetup held in London on Tuesday 17 November 2009.

This is the first of his videos, and shows the N900 being demonstrated by Nokia’s Tanja Sauvol using an LCD TV plugged in to the video output of the N900.

Tanja points out that with Maemo you can start up your preferred applications (such as the browser) in the 1GB of application memory (256MB RAM, 768MB swap) then just leave the applications running in the background for quick access. She says she has had 25 or more applications running at once.

Tanja then shows us messaging and notifications, and demonstrates usage with multiple email accounts You can synchronise your contacts with multiple synchronisation services. She then showed the 3D “rolling-ball” game Bounce Evolution.

Because the N900 lends itself to “always-online” use, you can see your friends’ latest status and share your own status with them. You can share your location too, if you like.

For now, additional free applications are available only through Maemo Select, but after a software update applications will also be available through Nokia’s Ovi store.

Chanse Arrington, Multimedia Product Manager at Nokia North America, gave a quick demo of the N900’s multitasking to Mark Guim of The Nokia Blog.

Chanse has his four desktops set up with a panoramic background, which means that the desktop wallpaper is a wraparound 3200×480 pixel image which flows smoothly from one desktop to the next.

In the top-left of each desktop (”home screen”) is a button for the application menu which is also used for multitasking. Pressing it brings up the application icons, from which an app can be started with a press. Once there are one or more apps running, the application/multitasking button brings up a screen of currently-running apps, making it easy to switch between them. Or, press on the button again to bring up the application icons so that you can launch another app. It’s easier to see it on the video than to read about it.

Chanse also  mentioned that the N900 is equipped with T-Mobile 3G bands in the US, and can switch seamlessly from 3G to WiFi.

(Although the N900 can be used with AT&T in the US, it will not use 3G and data transfer will be much slower.)

Mark Guim commented that the thumbnails on the multitasking screen are very small when there are more than three open apps. He felt that the “card view” of the Palm Pre was a more efficient use of screen space.