Interface
We found the screen to be perfectly responsive, if not great in that respect. The N900 doesn't support multitouch, so zooming in and out of web pages is done by a double tap on the screen. Navigating web pages was nonetheless perfectly straightforward and the quality of the images good, however moving around web pages without inadvertently clicking on a hyperlink can be tricky, bordering on annoying.
Worth noting is that this is currently the only platform on which you can use Firefox Mobile, which we found to be quicker than the built-in web browser, despite the latter being made by Mozilla too.
Setting-up push email via exchange was pretty straightforward; thanks to a wizard provided by Nokia, and the N900 has the distinct advantage over many smartphones that you can have several windows running several different apps open at once. But while the phone will make a little noise and flash an alert light when a new email is received, there's no on-screen alert, which is an issue.
Talking about apps, one distinct benefit of owning a Nokia smartphone is the free Ovi Maps satnav application, a special Maemo version of which comes pre-installed on the N900. Ovi Maps loads up nice and quickly and has no trouble getting a GPS signal. However, inputting a location can be a bit fiddly and getting the view you want requires further fiddling, so it's not as easy to use as a standalone satnav device.
The Ovi store itself is perfectly well laid-out, but we found that there weren't too many apps available for Maemo yet. This could well be about to change with the merger of Maemo and Intel's Moblin OS and should also offer cross-compatibility with larger computing devices.
There is also a ‘Maemo Select' icon on the home screen to help you find what there is for Maemo on the Nokia website. The home page is quite customisable; adding or removing icons is in theory straightforward but again can be a bit fiddly.
The camera seems excellent, with a lot of automatic functions that you would expect from a dedicated point-and-shoot camera. The same is true of the video recording functionality.
The battery life seems perfectly adequate while using the phone, but runs down surprisingly fast when it's on standby. On average the phone is sending us an alert that it's about to run out of juice about every 48 hours, even if we haven't touched it in that time, which seems odd.
On the whole the Nokia N900 is a very impressive array of technologies packaged into a handheld device. The chip and graphics handled everything we threw at it easily and it justifies the ‘mobile computer' label given to it by Nokia.
The only overt negative that struck us about the phone was the standby battery life, but if this was your main day-to-day phone you'd probably be recharging it every night anyway.
The big danger with cramming so much computing goodness into one package is what faces all converged devices: does it perform each function well enough? The handset is bulky, although to a certain degree that's inevitable with a slide-out QWERTY and while it does most things well, it can sometimes be less than obvious how to get the best out of some of the functions.
On the whole it's a good effort by Nokia and sets the scene for even more mobile computing goodness in the near future. But if Nokia hopes to even keep up with, let alone beat the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft in the smartphone market it needs to offer a user interface that makes it much easier and more intuitive to access all these clever features.
The Good
Excellent hardware spec
Multitasking
Does most of the things you could ask of a smartphone well
The not so good
The user interface is relatively rudementary
Poor standby battery life
On the large side
HEXUS Rating
Nokia N900
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Nokia N900 smartphone can be ordered from the following retailers:
Carphone Warehouse, contract - from £30 per month for a 'free' handset
HEXUS Right2Reply
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