2009-11-09 15:39:26 - Could it be that Nokia finally gets its product on the right trajectory to bury the iPhone right in its own game? It looks like the Nokia N900 has what it takes to do just that but somehow misses one aspect about the iPhone other maker likewise miss. If Nokia thinks it’s all about power and putting all the features that make the user want nothing more, what the N900 achieves is just another great smartphone that still won’t dislodge the iPhone from the top of the pecking order anytime soon.

Great Technical Wizardry

Nokia has been on the forefront of the “smartphone is a computer” trend proclaiming its handsets as the new wave of computing devices that started with the N95 smartphone. While smartphones do sport a processor, an operating system and applications that bring them in the domain of computers, they remain short of the desktop computing experience we are

familiar with.

They’re just too small to bring us there. The N900 does sport the most computing power among smartphones. It is, after all, a fusion of the Internet tablet Nokia started with the N770 back in 2005 and succeeds the latest N810 tablet which is not a mobile phone.

Starting with a powerful set of processors, the N900 actually uses three including the OMAP 3420 ARM Cortex A8 processor (sounds impressive in the name alone) from Texas Instruments and clocked at 600 MHz, that runs the Maemo 5.0 OS. It has the equivalent of the PC video accelerator in the PowerVR SGX 530 GPU from Imagination Technologies supporting OpenGL that acts the graphics engine. Then there’s the TMS320C64x clocked at 430 MHz to run the camera, audio processing, telephony and data transmission offloaded from the main Cortex A8 core. Whew, just writing about it gets impressive enough. The N900 boast of a 1GB RAM and 32 GB of internal storage that gets microSD expandability for up to 16 GB.

With such power, the N900 brings you all the features of a 3G internet device on a multimedia imaging smartphone like Bluetooth with EDR and A2DP, WiFi, integrated GPS, stereo FM receiver, TV out and 3.5mm headphone jack, high speed USB 2.0 and microUSB and a stunning 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss autofocus camera with dual LED flash, 3x digital zoom and VGA video recording at 30 frames per second.

Is the iPhone Challenge Met?

QWERTY slider or not, the N900 is not your typical slim and sexy handset. Far from it. You get almost 2cm of thickness with a weight of 181g that can pull your pants down. Only the biggest hand would feel comfortable holding it. It’s understandable that with all the state-of-the-art features Nokia put into it that the N900 should be so huge.

Its large body makes the 3,5” display look small though nobody will dispute its brilliant 16 million colors on a resistive touchscreen. What, no capacitive multitouch? And the QWERTY keypad makes it a serious piece of hardware though only the tiniest fingers would ever type on them with any ease.

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