Hello!

After a big pause, I’m back =)

For this comeback I’ll be talking about something off topic, yet interesting: a high end mobile phone.

Out of the blue, I got a chance to try out the Nokia N900. In this post I’ll describe my impressions.

First of all, I own a Nokia N97. Compared to it, the N900’s touch screen feels more responsive. The general impression I got is that this device is more polished than the one I have.

One characteristic that will please some people and make others hate the mobile is that it feels more like a computer than like a phone. The ‘average’ user will hate, the geek user will love. It comes with a Linux version, Maemo, with a nice package manager that allows you to install a lot of stuff easily. But you can fall-back to the command line if you want.

N900

It comes with a ‘stylus’ pen, which is very handy, again better than the N97 one – actually, it seems that the newer versions of the N97 doesn’t even include the pen. I liked using the N900’s pen better than my fingers actually, and mainly when I was playing Mahjongg with it – one of the few games I downloaded from the application manager.

Since I’m a Java developer, I had to try and install Java. Its a bit more trouble than normal, but doable. You install a full Java SE, not a Java ME implementation, which is nice. But the rather small screen won’t help you when you try to run applications developed for a full size monitor. Anyway, I didn’t find much use for it, but it works.

Some readers probably already know that I love podcasts. This means that I HAD to try to use the N900 as a podcatcher. It has a gPodder version that works nicely. Thumbs up, and once again it is much better than the option available on the N97.

One last consideration is regarding the language support. In summary, the language support in Symbian (the N97 is a Symbian device) seems crap to me. I never could get japanese stuff to display properly. With Maemo on the other hand, it worked out of the box. I finally could open japanese websites correctly.

There are some drawbacks as well. But there is only a couple of things that I really disliked in the device: its size and weight. It won’t fit in any pocket, and forget about your shirt’s pocket: it would be really annoying to carry it there.

Finally, I would like to thank womworld for the opportunity. I loved the device and I would buy one if it wasn’t expensive, even more here in Brazil. Also, I would like to apologize to them for the delay when returning the device. It happens that the Brazilian customs puts a lot of bureaucracy on us, so returning the device was a pain.

That’s all, next time I’ll be back on track with Java or Scala or something along those lines. See ya!