N900 Videos

Matthew Miller presents a walkthrough of the phone functionality of the N900, which is the first Nokia Maemo device to have an integrated cellphone (although Maemo supported Skype calls on all previous Nokia Internet Tablets—the 770, N800 and N810).

The walkthrough starts with waking up the phone by pressing the power button and moving an on-screen slider.

The phone application defaults to portrait mode. You can switch between a dialling pad and your contacts list. Cellular phone calls, Skype calls, and Google Talk are closely integrated. For each contact you can store phone numbers, Skype numbers, Google Talk, IM etc.

When you initiate a call you see a speaker button, a dialpad button, a mute button and of course an “End” button. The proximity sensor will turn off the display if you hold the phone up to your ear, the same as with an iPhone. Opening the keyboard switches the phone application to landscape mode, where the same options are available.

When you add a contact you get a wide choice of fields: the usual cell/landline/work/home combinations, plus email, Google Talk, Jabber, Ovi, SIP, Skype etc. You can also add non-communication information such as address, birthday, web page, gender, nickname, company and job title, and a general-purpose note.

Matthew ends on a positive note: “The more I use it, the more I actually enjoy using it as a phone. The phone call quality is typical Nokia, very high.”

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.