Kshitij Sobti

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Posted on 04-06-2010

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In an event for tech-bloggers and reviewers, today Nokia officially launched the Nokia N900 in India. The dream geek device will finally be available, but at a steep price of Rs. 30,639.

After the announcement, all the bloggers, reviewers and geeks present there were taken for a spin on four-wheeled rally cars, an effort by Nokia representatives to show us the errors of our literary ways -- we should have become rally-drivers instead. No really, Nokia compared the experience to the speed and thrill of owning an N900 device.

Of all the devices in the market the N900 is a favourite of geeks, and the reasons are clear. It runs a version of Linux, with an actual, usable terminal. If that wasn’t enough, it is a mobile device which actually has a swap partition. It can run nearly any open source software, since it has a proper Linux distro, unlike Android. You can install deb packages from a repository, and there is no dearth of free software for Maemo -- the version of Linux which runs on the N900.

You can run a virtualization application to actually emulate and run PC operating systems on it, and this is the famous phone that actually managed to boot an older version of Mac OS for PPC using the PearPC emulator !

If that wasn’t enough to geek out, here are some more of the N900 specifications:

• 3.5-inch screen 800x480 16 million colour resistive touch-screen
• ARM Cortex-A8 600MHz
• Up to 1GB of memory with 256MB RAM and 768MB virtual memory
• Up to 48GB storage,
• Full browser (with an Acid3 score of 94), with full Flash support (v 9.4 not 10.1)
• 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens with up to 800x480 video recording at 25fps
• Integrated GPS with A-GPS
• Integrated FM transmitter (will work in India)
• Composite AV connector for TV-out
• All the other usual wireless connectivity options

What’s more, each and every thing is open to programming. At the event they demonstrated an application which displayed an icon in case you left the camera cover open, and showed that you could actually get community created extensions which could extend the social services and sync locations that it can access. We could go on, but it is better you wait for our review instead!

On an unfortunate side-note, Skype for the N900 will not be available on the device due to some government restrictions, although the FM transmitter will.

After putting so much into one little device, unfortunately Nokia decided to give it a resistive screen, which does not do justice to its capabilities. The price too, at around 30,000 is much higher than what it sells for across the sea. If you can afford it -- lucky you -- you can pick up from Nokia retail stores later this month.