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Well, the N900 I had on trial has since gone back to WOMWorld, and it’s time for a summary blog post. No look at a gadget would be complete without boiling the good and bad of it into an arbitrary number of points (and there’s already a few lists out there from Starry Hope and Prodigal Fool (who did two) amongst others), so here we go – 10 things I love about the N900 and 10 things I hate about it. But I also wanted to compare it to its most obvious competitor, the iPhone, and frankly the iPhone gets its backside kicked in the comparison, so you can also read the two fundamental reasons why the N900 is better than the iPhone ﻿and will remain so.

buy the european power supplies and whatever; well, it’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other).

buy the european power supplies and whatever; well, it’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other).

(BTW, for our US readers, yes, your prices are much lower; but (a) the same points apply, and (b) by the time you buy the product in the US, ship it to Ireland, pay the various taxes and duties and customs charges

(BTW, for our US readers, yes, your prices are much lower; but (a) the same points apply, and (b) by the time you buy the product in the US, ship it to Ireland, pay the various taxes and duties and customs charges

multitasking and the fact that people are accepting it being called that says very bad things about the state of computer science degrees in the US and elsewhere — and I say they ‘might’ introduce it because I remember MacOS prior to OSX, and anyone who’d ship an OS that couldn’t do proper memory management might well never introduce multitasking even when everyone else has had it since the 1970s)

Bug 6063. I love the N900, I think it’s a groundbreaking piece of design that beats the iPhone as a device – but bug 6063 kills it stone dead at a single stroke. Everything else about the N900 could be even more perfect than it is, Nokia could give them away for free to anyone who wanted one, and 6063 would still kill it dead. Bug 6063 manifests as total silence when you answer or make a call. You can’t hear anything, the person on the other end of the line can’t hear anything, and there’s no error message or hint that something’s wrong with the phone rather than the line. I actually tried calling someone several times before finding that it was the phone that was the problem, and that’s appallingly unacceptable. Equally, I lost several calls while fiddling about trying to find the hands-free headset and plug it into the phone and answer in time. That’s utterly unacceptable as well. Look, the N900 means I don’t have to carry several other tools. No need for a camera, a netbook, an FM radio, an MP3/4 player, etc, etc. It’s a great communications tool. But if I have to have a hands-free kit to use it as a phone, then, well, it fails. Completely and utterly, without hope of redemption. If this bug isn’t at the top of the Nokia tech team’s priority list right now, I’d be deeply worried.

No physical shortcut keys. On the E71, you have four physical shortcut keys which let you launch a few apps with a physical button, and one of those will take you to the home screen (or desktop, if you want to call it that); and with the iPhone there’s just the one button, and it drops you back to the home screen. That’s an important UI design point on a handheld device, where the amount of time it takes to tick off the end user is a lot less than on a desktop platform, and where the time it takes to launch an app can be critical. The different requirements for mobile and desktop users from a UI perspective are reasonably well known; but maybe not well known enough. Still, given the flexibility of the platform, it should be possible to jury-rig something in software. The power button menu, perhaps – there’s already an app that alters the menu that brings up.

The touchscreen. There’s been a fair bit of comment on the choice of a resistive instead of a capacitive touchscreen for the N900; and most of it seems to be accurate enough, unlike my (admittedly fat) fingers when using it. It does give a distinctly clunky feel to the device when you press an onscreen button, and nothing happens (especially so when you hear the click sound effect and feel the vibrate, which is a lovely feedback technique, but is let down horribly when the fingerpress isn’t actually accepted by the application). It works really well with the stylus, but the stylus is a rather double-edged sword (if you’ll ignore the really confusing mental image that conjures up). Using the stylus does give pixel-perfect accuracy; but it also means you’re using a stylus instead of your fingers, which slows things down, makes them feel clunky, and takes me personally right back to the Psion Series V. In this area, the iPhone has the N900 soundly trounced I’m afraid, but perhaps firmware upgrades can work a miracle here.

Speed. Much as I hate to say it, the N900 was sluggish on a few occasions for me; though usually in terms of latency rather than throughput (ie. it’d take a while to fire something up, but it ran fine once it got going). Why this is so, I’m not sure. Maybe o verclocking would fix this, or maybe it’s a software kink; either way, it really should be fixed before you open the box…

Battery life. Try as I might, I couldn’t get a full day out of the N900 if I used it continually. I could use it as an MP4 player on a three-hour train run, then as a GPS to find the hotel, and could then read my emails after checking in; but then it was down to about 25% charge and it was time to recharge. Certainly, I could get a day’s light use from it off a single charge, and far more if I only ever used it as a phone; the problem here is that the N900 does so much that you’re going to use it more heavily than you would a normal phone. A bigger battery really is needed here…

Marketing. Yes, it’s cheaper than anything that does as much as it does (if such a device existed, which I doubt it does). Yes, it does more than anything else out there. Yes, as an example of convergence in a mobile device, it kicks the iPhone from here to the wall ( and in design , the iPhone’s strongest area). But no-one seems to have heard about it, and getting one is rather difficult and seems more expensive than getting any of its peers . If you want an N900 or own one, you’re probably a geek and therefore in a minority. Will the N900 be the new flagship for the business market, the demographic that could appreciate the communications convergence better than any other? I don’t see the marketing push to get that to happen. There’s a growing concern that the move from Maemo to Meego will leave the device effectively abandoned by Nokia – so why isn’t there a far stronger push than this one to counter that rumour and let everyone know that the N900 will be running Meego via an upcoming firmware release? Why, in short, aren’t we seeing the N900 pushed on every advertising channel out there? This is the best phone Nokia have on the market right now, the most innovative, and the only phone I can think of from any manufacturer that fundamentally kicks the iPhone’s backside; so why don’t I see this thing on offer from every mobile operator and in adverts from every billboard? Without that kind of push, without that kind of market, the N900’s long-term future isn’t as sound as it could be.

Time. This is both a cause and an effect — the N900 is newer than the iPhone platform and therefore there are fewer apps written for it at the moment (a few hundred versus tens of thousands for the iPhone/iTouch/iPad). It’s not as widely known, it’s not as widely available and it’s fighting an uphill battle to get recognised in this particular market segment. And because it was late to market, it’s got a big fight on its hands, despite having the goods. And because of that cause, the effect is a question of time – namely, if it doesn’t do well in the market, how long will it be supported for? It’s the best device out there right now for what it does; if it suddenly becomes a Palm Pre with questions over support and longevity, that’s not good for its adopters.

Lack of polish. Maybe it’s another effect of time, but the N900 just doesn’t feel polished. Yes, you can get it to do amazing things; but out of the box, it doesn’t do them. There are quirks. The PC Suite didn’t initally work with it (I’ve seen reports that that’s since been fixed). The gesture recognition, especially for the kinematic scrolling, wasn’t as flawless as it could have been. When your competitor for this market is Apple, you really can’t afford to skimp on the polish; and when you’re doing a better technical job than Apple, it’s a crying shame to skimp on it.

It feels reactive, not proactive. Mostly, you see this with applications like Witter and others; but you do get the distinct impression, using the N900 day-to-day, that it does things when you poke it; and that’s not always what you want. For example, when using a Twitter client like Witter, I want it going off to twitter in the background and constantly updating and keeping track of things. Likewise with Gmail clients and other communications programmes. When it doesn’t do that, when it takes a user action to initiate such a check for new messages, it’s a design error. I get the reason for not checking gmail every five minutes automatically, but frankly there’s no point in saving battery life if you’re not going to use it to do what I want you to! Happily, this is a software issue only, and can be tweaked fairly easily.

It’s only available in black. What? I needed ten points and there just isn’t that much that’s bad about it!