Antinormal

Quick N900 Review

Verdict: The N900 is an awesome piece of hardware.

Or if you prefer the long version: I picked up a Nokia N900 about a week ago (after several months of resistance which turned out to be clearly futile) and it has effectively replaced my N97 as my primary mobile device. I'm not going to go into details in this post, so I'll just outline the main points I've observed in this speedy review. Also, I haven't used the camera yet (sorry, folks!) but I probably will when I get out more.

The Good
- Maemo 5 is very fast and responsive and the interface is very nice. I've read a few posts saying that the interface is unintuitive, but I don't see anything unintuitive about this.
- Conversations. This is by far the best feature in my opinion. Particularly useful for SMS messages as they are treated like IMs. Basically, SMS messages from the same sender are grouped in a single view with your replies to that sender. It's also used for IMs which function like, well, IMs.
- Seamless integration with VoIP and IM accounts in the Phone application and Contacts view. Only Google Talk, Skype, Ovi and Jabber are supported but it's nice being able to make a call using any of these options when you open up the Contact View.
- Web browsing experience is superb. But then again, everyone already knows this.
- Desktop widgets and shortcuts. Quick access to anything and everything.
- Media Player plays practically everything. Or at least all the different audio and video file formats I have.

The Bad
- The touchscreen became unresponsive on me once which led to having to reboot the device. I've not experienced this again, though.
- Can't resume firmware updates if the connection breaks, but my slow connection takes most of the blame for this. Resume functionality would be nice, though.
- Email application could use pagination settings. Not being able to set the number of emails to display at once isn't ideal.
- Maps application is limited. It'd be very nice to have the S60 Ovi Maps edition on this with free navigation.
- No Ovi Suite support.

The Ugly
- Phone application doesn't support USSD out-of-the-box. To perform operator requests (those numbers that contain * and #), I have to run a script on the terminal or use a 3rd party desktop widget.
- Can't create playlists with the Media Player.
- Based on some posts I've seen, I'm scared the USB port might come off at any time. But let's hope it doesn't.

Overall, I think it's a well-rounded device that does just about everything. I'm hoping for firmware updates that will fix the feature omissions and USSD issues.

Over the next few weeks, I plan on doing a series of reviews of ISPs in Nigeria. I'm also thinking of setting up a community forum on antinormal. Because I can. And all the cool kids have one.