The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

This morning I re-read my January post on Nokia’s Maemo-based qwerty slider called the N900. Why? Because I have had one in my hands for the past few days so I wanted to compare my expectations with reality.

Reality bites.

I know the phone is already 6-7 months old, but still, Nokia could not have thought that they can take on the iPhone or Android (or even Palm WebOS) with the N900. Firstly the phone just is not stylish – it is too thick and chunky. It doesn’t say look at me I am cool. It says look at my I am a geek. I know there are many geeks out there, and some of them are loving the open-source nature of the N900 and Maemo, but there are not enough of them to create serious market momentum behind the Maemo platform.

The slide-out qwerty keyboard is not bad, but is also not good. It has three rows only, with very little space between the top row and the edge of the screen. As a result my thumbs bump against the screen edge when I type on the top row. At least the keys are nice and large with decent travel. The keyboard on my Motorola Droid/Milestone is much better.

The screen is nice and bright with good resolution (not as bright as the Milestone), but is resistive. Those Finns and their gloves again I guess. The response of the screen is poor compared to any of the zillion capacitive screens out there. It is similar to the N97′s screen in terms of response. The N900 even comes with a stylus! I thought styluses (is that a word?) died out with Windows Mobile. Anyway nothing shouts geek like a stylus.

And then there is the screen orientation. Nokia has been marketing the N900 as a “mobile computer” rather than a phone, but forcing one to do everything in landscape orientation, except for phoning, is a bit much. It means you need both hands for pretty much everything. What a drag. Anyway I don’t see how this phone is more of a computer than any of the other high end phones out there, except maybe for the iPhone 4 which still cannot properly multi-task, something which computers have been doing for years.

Let’s look inside the phone, at Maemo the operating system, which at one point was touted as Nokia’s new high-end operating platform. If it is, Nokia is in trouble. Maemo may be open-source and powerful underneath, but it is dressed in out-of-date unstylish clothes. The user interface is better than Symbian’s but only just. Compared to WebOS, Android, and iPhone OS, it looks and feels way out of date. And it is just not finger-friendly enough. The multi-tasking works well though, with a single screen called the dashboard showing all your open apps. Not that you will have many apps open, as there are only a handful of apps available for Maemo.

The list of shortcomings in Maemo/N900 is long:

* No Youtube viewer. The browser (try Mozilla Firefox if you don’t like the on-board browser) supports Flash so you can view videos directly in the browser, but the performance and image quality is a distant second to the excellent Youtube apps available on all Android phones, Palm Pres and iPhones. Even the Winmobile HTC HD2 has a Youtube app.

* The browser is so-so. It doesn’t even reformat the text when you zoom in, so you have to drag the screen left and right in order to read text. What a pain.

* The N900 wouldn’t upload the phone contacts to my car’s bluetooth system. I read up on this and it seems this a missing feature in Maemo. More pain.

* The phone does not sync properly with Gmail calendar and contacts. Read about Maemo’s Mail for Exchange implementation here before you buy this phone.

* The biggest killer for me is that the support for corporate email and calendar stops at Mail for Exchange with no plans to support Lotus Notes. Not clear why Nokia has not provides Lotus Notes support, especially considering that the E72 comes with Notes Traveler built in. To me this is big sign saying that Nokia does not (never has or no longer) regard the N900 as their flagship nor Maemo as their new platform. I have asked the guys at Commontime to see if they can get their mNotes5 product working with the N900. If they succeed then the Lotus Notes geeks (like myself) will be able to sync our corporate email, calendar and contacts.

I can carry on with the litany of shortcomings, but I am fast losing interest in the N900. So, in summary, it is not good enough. Nokia needs something better, and they need it fast. Roll on Symbian 4.

Symbian is toast, at least for Nokia’s future top of the range devices. Maemo is the new Symbian. First used in Nokia’s internet tablet in 2005, the brand new N900 runs the latest Maemo incarnation. Looks very sleek, and with Mozilla as its web browsing technology, should be yum. Like just about every other new mobile OS, e.g. Palm WebOS, iPhone OS, etc, Maemo is also based on Linux. The latter may not have succeeded in dislodging Microsoft Windows from its pc throne, but it is a clear winner in the mobile world.

Ditching Symbian on its high-end phones is probably a good move on Nokia’s part. Symbian is solid, but old, and still can’t probably handle rich text format HTML emails. It also falls short in many other areas such as web browsing and on-line video. The latest Symbian adaption for Nokia touchscreen phones like the N97 and Express Music falls way short of the competition in terms of its user interface. Anyone that has used either of these phones will know about the confusing way in which you have to double-press in some places and single-press in others.

The best feature of the N900 is arguably its 3.5 inch 16 million colours touchscreen. But why another resistive touchscreen Nokia? It is time for a multi-touch capacitive screen. Everyone else has one, even Winmobile! I can understand that the Fins don’t want to take their gloves off, but it is warm where I am. No gloves here.