An Early Peek at the Nokia N900

Nokia released details about its first-ever Linux-based smart phone.
The Finnish cellphone maker will formally launch the N900 smart phone in October for about $713 ( 2,566 Dirhams). It features a 3.5-inch touch screen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 32 GB of storage, 1 GB of app memory, and Wi-Fi, among other features that prompted oohs and aahs in the blogosphere.

And unlike Nokia’s other phones that run on the Symbian operating system, the N900’s Linux-based Maemo operating system, which means that the smart phone will operate more like a PC. The company is touting it as a mobile computer “that is fusing the power of the computer, the Internet and the mobile phone,” Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s executive vice president for markets, said in a statement.
The move to switch to a Linux OS is likely a strategy to give Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android a run for their money.
It could also help Nokia snag a piece of the ever-lucrative mobile application market through Nokia’s Ovi app store, which launched last May. Nokia also announced Wednesday that next year it would launch its own mobile payment service, Nokia Money, which would allow users to make micropayments via text and mobile Internet. But some journalists wondered about the wisdom of Nokia’s decision to emphasize both Symbian and Linux. “What I think I want to see is Nokia licensing Palm’s webOS, used on the Pre,” wrote PC World’s David Coursey. “It makes little sense for Nokia to try to turn both Linux and Symbian into high-end players. But, stranger things have happened, though they haven’t been too successful.”

And Wired’s Charlie Sorrel said the verdict on the N900 will come down to the software, “a place where Nokia has arguable lost its way of late,” though he did note that “the pictures look promising, and the light-on-dark interface is both clear and gorgeous.”
Meanwhile, in Twitterland, the topic “Nokia N900″ was one of the trends du jour Thursday, with users tweeting such varied observations as: “The Nokia N900 is a gorgeous piece of handiwork,” “Just read about the new Nokia N900, but I’m still tempted by the iPhone 3Gs,” and “Nokia’s N900 looks pretty sweet. If only they could get their act together and find an American carrier to subsidize it.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal