The Nokia N900 – Nokia’s Saviour?

Been about a week since I got my N900 here in Malaysia; a quick bitesized review:

Battery Life
Pretty bad. I’ve never even considered buying a car charger for any of my previous phones (and believe me when I say I’ve had a lot of phones). So, me ordering a car charger for the N900 should give you an idea of how bad the battery life is. It’s even bad enough that I just keep the phone plugged in to a charger whenever I’m at home. Right now, I’m typically getting 6-8 hours from a full charge. There’s some talk on the Maemo forums about battery life suddenly (drastically) improving about 2 weeks into usage so we’ll see what happens then… but for now, I’m going to have to say the 1320mAh battery Nokia decided to include for the N900 is a fair bit short (the 1500mAh N97 battery would still probably be a fair bit short but likely a little better).

Apps
One of the things that iFanatics typically heap praise on is the abundance of apps for their beloved iPhone. The Apple AppStore has 100000 apps (or something to that effect)… of which most people use (maybe) 20 of. The Maemo store has about 100 apps, of which I personally use about 10. The word ratio comes to mind but I can’t quite figure out what to say with it. The heavily anticipated apps have yet to make their way to the stable branch of the Maemo store sadly; VLC, Vagalume, etc. are all still in extras-devel. Firefox (Fennec 1.0.0) just made it into stable about 5 hours ago.

UI
4 desktops, integration with SkyPE and GoogleTalk (and MSN to come apparently?), Expose style multitasking. If I don’t say something negative right now, iFanatics may hunt me down and kill me. So, it isn’t as “smooth” as the iPhone (occasionally when I’m doing 10 different things). Enough said.

Hardware
Somewhat undecided on this. The 600MHz ARM CPU may be a tiny bit slow considering the availability of the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU on various other available and upcoming phones. 256MB RAM (with 768MB swap for total 1GB in theory), hmmm, a little short too. PowerVR SGX GPU… fair enough. Not too shabby, could be better… but then again, if I have 6-8 hours of battery life with these specs, would I have 2 hours if I had all the specs I wanted?

Camera
Holy crap?

Conclusion
Well, compared to the (completely horrendous) N96/N97 (which I both owned), the Nokia N900 could be the holy grail, the reinvention of the wheel, and the 7 wonders of the world… all rolled into one. Unfortunately for Nokia, compared to everything else that’s available on the (global) market (ie. Motorola Milestone, Google Nexus 1), while it isn’t behind by any means… it isn’t something that would make your eyes pop out of their sockets either.

On the other hand, if you take into consideration that the N900/Maemo 5 is what Nokia calls step 5 out of 6 (the end product being the N920 (rumored name) based on Maemo 6), then I supposed you could say that things are looking up for Nokia. The question is if Nokia will choose to piss off the majority of Asia AGAIN by not officially launching the N920 (again, rumored) here.