Kshitij Sobti

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Posted on 30-07-2010

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You mean it also makes calls?

The first reaction most people had to the Nokia N900 when they picked it up and started using it was “it’s a little heavy”, which seemed a little blasphemous to me. “But... it runs Linux!” I replied, which merely got me an “oh!” at best, and a quizzical expression, at worst. “Wait, how do you make calls on this?” I was asked, and I realized - I had never really tried to make one. “It’s very easy,” I said “you just... click the... well... you type in... hmm... it’s easy... umm... gimmie back my phone!”.

To understand the purpose and use-case of the N900, it is important to see where it came from. The N900 is the latest in Nokia’s series of Maemo-based internet tablets. The previous internet tablets that Nokia created did not even feature phone support, and N900 is the first. Knowing this, it is important to realize that telephony is a mere feature of this device, not its function. It is only slightly more convenient than making calls from your desktop using a modem.

Well, not really, but the N900 isn’t the easiest phone to use. The phone feature is always multiple clicks away, there is no simple easy way to get to the calling function – though hopefully you will be too busy using your phone as a computer to make calls.

If you have frequently used contacts, you can drop them to the desktop, for quick access. You can also just start typing the name of your contact while at the desktop, and the phone will automatically search through the contacts. However if you need to make a call to someone not in your contact list, it is not as simple. The best way is to create a shortcut to the phone app on your desktop.

However, the Nokia N900 also offers some powerful integration features when it comes to making calls. As it supports being connected to Google out of the box, you can make calls through Google Chat as simply as you would make a call over your cellular network! Calling over Skype is supported as well, but the Indian version won’t offer it. At least not out of the box.

Visually, the Nokia N900 isn’t as captivating as some of the other phones you may have seen. Nokia isn’t know for the best designs, and many people will fail to find the N900 a magnificent beauty.

Sure, the N900 looks like a brick, but a brick from Darth Vader’s apartment, which is kind of cool in itself.
 

A geek’s soulmate

  The Nokia N900 is a magnificent device. One not without its flaws though. For one, it is a rather expensive device, at around Rs 30,000, at that price one would expect it to have a capacitive touch-screen, which is its second drawback: As it is, the touch experience on the N900 is a little disappointing. Part of the reason for this is that not all applications available in the repositories are optimized for a touch screen display.

With the QWERTY keypad though, the phone works quite well. Sadly some commonly used keys for the console, are absent – such as the Tab key, although it is still placed on the console window within reach.

Sound has always been problematic for me on Linux, and the N900 was no exception. However this being a single device with a single hardware and software specification on which it has to run, such issues were not expected. Sometimes, the device would start emitting clicking sounds, and the music player would play noise instead of music. This may just have been due to the large number of unstable 3rd party applications I had installed on the phone though, and it only happened twice.

So in the end, here’s a simple test: If after reading that you could run Windows 98 in a VM on the Nokia N900 you thought,  “but why would I want to do that?” -- the N900 is not for you; and if you read the previous question and though “well, because I can!” then the N900 is definitely for you.

For a geek, getting the N900 is like meeting your soul-mate, your true love, and then finding out he / she bites his / her toe-nails. Just a little short of perfection: a capacitive touchscreen here, a TAB key there, there and the N900 could have been much better — not perfect though, but much better.