N900 review, day 2

The people at http://www.womworld.com/nokia/ were nice enough to offer me a N900 trial. I gleefully contacted them to find out it was only a two trial. I almost declined it, but I am glad I accepted. It has been two days since I received the trial and I can’t stop playing.

Please note this is my first two days with the device, and I have barely scratched the surface. Any comparisons, observations or biases have been formed over years of my experiences with Maemo based devices. I have not used ANY other smart phones.

It came with the latest firmware US loaded. It appeared to be a NEW phone. My first impressions were, TOO SMALL, TOO BIG.

The phone itself feels like it weighs at least as much as my Nokia 810 Internet Tablet, if not slightly more. The Keyboard coming from the 810 was smaller and I initially HATED it. I seem able to adapt somewhat and I mostly stopped hitting “m” every time I tried to press spacebar. I do not like the layout of the keyboard, again coming from an 810, the lack of DPAD and the arrow keys on the right are frustrating for me. I am sure I could get used to it, again its been two days. Users without previous Nokia 810 device experience may not even notice any issues with the keyboard? Also the lack of hardware escape key and device menu drive me nutty, but people without previous maemo experience would not even be bothered by this. The screen is too small for my liking, size not resolution, (although I wouldn’t mind 1024×600), but again, a larger screen. If the screen had filled the phone face I think it would have been better.

Speaking of coming from the 810, am I the only one who constantly trys to put the stylus in the top, instead of the bottom of the phone?

When I placed my SIM in the phone and I fired it up, I was initially wondering where all my contacts from my SIM card were, but I eventually figured how to copy them off into my contacts. I had the 10$ USA Tmobile plan on the phone and when I brought up the internet it said that the phone was not compatible with the data service I had chosen. I called tmobile and they changed me to the unlimited 25$ per month plan, and I was online and mobile. I think I could have probably used the 10$ plan if I had entered an APN, but I did not test this out.

The first issue I ran across with the phone was trying to connect via WIFI. It kept finding my network, but it would not prompt me for my preshared key. It wanted me to press a button on the access point and press next. First of all this is stupid, but I got my ass up and went and pressed a button. Needless to say it never worked. I finally managed to find the “internet connection” options in the control panel, sorry “settings” icon. It was not fast. I was able to set it up manually and it worked fine. This needs fixing for sure.

I really think Nokia needs to spend some time on the user manual. It needs to be 4-5 times thicker. There is a lot of built in functionality and it should all be documented.

The second thing I did once I got up and running, was fire up KDE 3.5.8 which I had compiled for Diablo (Nokia 810 OS) some time ago.

About KDE 3.5.8 on the N900: It ran great, I fired up Kstars and it was very responsive. Additionally Konqueror web and filesystem navigate also was great. It ran better under the N900, than it did on the 810. No surprise faster CPU and more memory help for sure even without a recompile

While it can be made to fire right up, it is not optimized in any way for the n900. If you attempt to try, you will most likely be reflashing, I have a few times already.

Next I tested video calling
N900 < Wifi > gmail
N900 < 3g > gmail
N900 < Wifi > N810
N900 < 3g > N810

All worked although sometimes my Tmobile 3g was lagging, and one call over 3g sounded like aliens. This was all very cool, I will do some more road testing soon.

OK Nokia are you listening. I want to be able to stream video to my website, along with GPS information. I created this long ago (the upper right corner) used to be a streaming cam from my laptop. I had a Sprint card in a laptop sending GPS and cam data back realtime. This was setup 5-6 years ago, cmon already!!

My biggest complaint so far are my greasy fingers. I can only imagine what I could have this thing doing, had I gotten one months ago.

Thanks Again to Womworld , I am gonna be crying in about 12 days

more to come………….