We’re not sure what we’ll do with our time now that Nokia have officially announced that their N900 is available in the US. It seemed like we spent half our day fielding rumors about its release – either dates or postponements – that’s when we weren’t playing with the device itself, of course.
Maemo – as on the Nokia N900 – is still more of a geek’s paradise than a consumer-ready platform, so we hope the development team responsible for it will be working hard over the next couple of years. That’s because the Maemo marketing team have let slip that, as of 2012, Maemo will replace Symbian as the OS for Nokia’s entire Nseries range of handsets.
SlashGear is at Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 conference in Helsinki, Finland this week, and the company has just confirmed that the much-anticipated Nokia N900 Maemo smartphone will be shipping today. We’ve been told that the handset – which has a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen and slide-out QWERTY keyboard – went out from Nokia’s production facilities over the weekend, with shipments of the handset beginning in Europe, the Middle East, Russia and North America.
Video demo of N900 Maemo 5 enhancements after the cut
One of the most common questions we’re being asked in the aftermath of our HTC HD2 unboxing is how its on-screen QWERTY keyboard compares to one of the other eye-catching smartphones of the quarter, the Nokia N900. We’ve staged a quick size and keyboard comparison, and you can find the gallery – and read our early opinions on both devices – after the cut.
Nokia’s N900 is already enticing developers, but right now there’s not the same compelling catalog of applications as you might find, say, in the iPhone’s App Store. Happily that just leaves room for Maemo coders to fill with their own apps, such as a homebrew open-source Spotify application.
Video demo after the cut
Having dithered around its release date like a forgetful felon, the Nokia N900 looks to have finally been granted a more or less official launch window. According to the official US Nokia store, the N900 will begin shipping at the “end of October 2009“; that tallies with what Amazon UK were saying back at the end of September (October 26th), but the mega-retailer has now changed its tune.
The Nokia N900 was the stand-out device from Nokia World back in September, and we’ve been tracking the Maemo 5 smartphone ever since. Imagine our surprise, then, when a pre-release N900 dropped onto the SlashGear test bench today; the hardware is final, so the 5-megapixel autofocus Carl Zeiss camera is onboard, together with HSPA, WiFi b/g, a 3.5-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen and slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and you can check out our video unboxing and gallery after the cut.
It’s looking like the launch of the Nokia N900 has been delayed, with two online retailers pushing back their estimated release dates to the end of October. Amazon UK is now suggesting that the N900 will arrive come October 26th, rather than at the beginning of the month as was previously expected.
Perhaps the stand-out device from Nokia World this year was the N900, the Finnish company’s new internet tablet/smartphone crossover. The final production version still isn’t on the market, but that hasn’t stopped “preview” reviews from those with access to prototypes, covering both Maemo 5 and the N900 hardware itself. My-Symbian have just pushed out a four page article doing just that, and they’re more than a little excited.
Part of Nokia’s challenge to cement the N900 and Maemo is in drawing developers to the open-source platform, and to do that they’ve kicked off PUSH N900, a “unique design, hacking and modding project”. To mark the event – which will see winning proposals rewarded with an N900, funding and support to deliver on their idea – the Finns commissioned four sample projects, inspired by the ’80s and using the N900 in distinctive ways. These ended up including a 3D ViewMaster camera, digital Rolodex, 80’s radio tagger/Last.fm integration, and a Speak and Spell mashup.
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