N900 Videos

This video comes in four parts. The first twenty seconds is a graphics extravaganza, showing blobs of light and gleaming metallic components coming together to form the bright dawning of a new product: the N900.

The next part runs at a frenetic pace and shows glimpses of what the N900 can do: home screens, app launcher, web browser, the Ovi store, messaging, video playback, multitasking, desktop widgets, contacts and chat.

The phone is then rotated and we see the lens cover slide open, revealing the camera with its two-LED flash, which fires. The taken photo shows us that we are in what appears to be a second-hand bookshop with 1970’s carpet. The geotagging shows that this is Helsinki, Finland, in 2009 and everything makes sense when we see the tags “comic” “convention” being added before the photo is uploaded to the cloud.

Finally we hear the familiar Nokia ringtone, and we are reminded that this mobile computer is also a cellphone handset. The screen presents the options “Answer” and “Reject”. Even though this dude is at a comic convention, he’s not too embarrassed to accept a call from his mother. The consensus is that her avatar shows a young and pretty mom, so perhaps he doesn’t need to feel too awkward about it. But we never hear the conversation, because it cuts to a closing shot showing the multitasking, with the movie still playing in a thumbnail window. Not too sure how useful that is though.

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.

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.