N900 Videos

Ovi Maps 1.0 has been supplied with pre-release N900s, although we can’t say for sure what’s on the production models.

It’s a competent mapping application, although fairly basic. This ubergizmo video shows panning and zooming of US maps, with “over-the-air” downloading of new map tiles. The +/- buttons zoom in steps, or can be held down for rapid zooming.

Alternatively, you can press the zoom-level indicator to choose from four pre-set levels (country, state, city and street). The maps are quite readable at each level, although perhaps not quite as richly detailed as Google’s maps. Satellite and terrain view are also available, as well as a “night view” – the purpose of which isn’t clear to me.

An address panel shows the current location, and there’s a search box to jump to places of interest. A compass icon allows you to rotate the map to any orientation.

All-in-all it’s an adequate application, although many people will be waiting to see what alternatives become available.

This video, from ubergizmo, shows nothing more than the N900 playing back a Nokia promotional video. As you can see, the playback is flawless.

According to Nokia’s N900 Technical Specifications, the N900 can play back a wide variety of video files (mp4, avi, wmv and 3gp) using these codecs: H264, MPEG4, Xvid, WMV and H263.

To ensure smooth playback:

• ensure that your WiFi or 3G network is fast enough, if streaming or playing from the network
• ensure that you’re not running performance-hogging applications in the background (multi-tasking)
• ensure that the video file is a suitable resolution and frame rate for the device

Bounce Evolution is a 3D graphics game from Rovio which runs quite well on the N900. Your mission is to steer a ball along a torturous course.

You steer the ball (using the accelerometer) and control its speed by tilting the N900. You can also make the ball jump by shaking the phone the correct way.

The frame rate seems reasonable, and the motion seems smooth. In theory, the N900 pushes fewer polygons to the screen per second than the iPhone 3GS (but more than the iPhone 3G), and the N900 has two and a half times as many pixels to paint, but this game doesn’t seem to strain the N900 too hard.

Of course, the N900 has true multi-tasking so you do need to make sure that you don’t have too many things running in the background if you want the game to be highly responsive.

(via ubergizmo)

This video from ubergizmo shows the N900 app launcher being used to start up MicroB, the Maemo web browser that uses the Mozilla rendering engine. A click on a bookmark (with thumbnail image) brings up the ubergizmo website.

As with many websites designed for desktop browsing, the text and images on ubergizmo are unreadably small when displayed on the N900, and there are several ways to zoom in.

Double-tapping on any part of the web page results in that part of the web page being zoomed to fill the width of the screen. This works pretty well. I guess the browser is looking at the width of the enclosing block element in the HTML code. The zooming is not perfect though, as the element does not always quite fill the screen, and sometimes seems offset a little. It’s quite functional though, even if not so smooth and finely-calibrated as the double-tap zoom on the iPhone’s Safari browser.

The second way to zoom in and out is to draw spirals on the screen with your finger: clockwise to zoom in and counter-clockwise to zoom out. This seems tedious compared to “pinch to zoom” on multi-touch screens (the N900’s resistive screen is single-touch), and I think spiral-zoom will get old very fast, although one advantage is that it can (only just!) be done with the thumb while holding the N900 one-handed. The effect is slightly off-putting visually, because the web page starts to pan (move around) before the software sees enough of the gesture to recognise it as a spiral and start zooming.

The third way to zoom is to use the +/- buttons on the top edge of the N900. These are normally used to change the volume, but the web browser uses them for zooming instead. Personally I’d like to be able to use hardware buttons to change the volume on a web page, but it seems this must be done with on-screen controls instead. The button-zooming seems to work well, with a reasonable choice of step size.

The video then shows some more examples of double-tap zooming, including the way the browser interprets double-tap as a “zoom out” command if the page element is already zoomed in. It seems quite usable.

Finally, the screen appears to freeze up and go blank, then the browser starts to open a new window. I’m not sure whether the user accidentally activated some interface element, or whether something went wrong on the device (which we should gracefully ascribe to the pre-production software).

This silent video shows the N900 close-up, to give a good feel for its shape and size, and to show its external features and ports.

The camera slider (lens cover) is marked “Carl Zeiss Tessar 2.8/5.2 AF 5MP”. When slid open, the lens and a dual-LED flash are visible. There’s no Xenon flash. An imprint in the black back of the device reads “NOKIA Nseries”. There is also a small kickstand which deploys from around the camera area, but this was not demonstrated.

Around the edge of the phone are the stereo speakers, a “lock” slider button, 3.5mm headphone jack, microphone opening, micro-USB charging and data port, zoom/volume up/down button, power button and camera shutter. The stylus can be pulled out, or pushed out with a thumb.

We also get a glimpse of the “Camera Mode” dialog, the multi-tasking application switcher, the slide-out keyboard and the application launcher.

(via ubergizmo)