Nokia Releases Linux Handset 484
galaxy writes "Nokia releases their first Linux mobile handset, the N900 The handset is based on the latest release of Maemo, the Nokia mobile Linux platform, and includes e.g. GSM and 3G access (with HSPA, giving datarates of up to 10Mbps downlink and 2Mbps uplink on suitable networks), WLAN, Bluetooth, camera, assisted GPS and, most importantly, a touchscreen complemented by a hardware QWERTY under a slider. The beast is powered by an ARM Cortex-A8 processor at 600 MHz, has PowerVR SGX with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, 32GB internal memory etc."
Re:how much is it? (Score:5, Informative)
500, in October. [engadget.com].
That works out to $712 USD as of this post (click for a more up-to-date rate [xe.com]), but that will probably be European style - unlocked and with no contract.
It will be up to carriers in countries like the US to decide how much to subsidise the phone, over what contract term.
Too lazy? (Score:1, Informative)
FTFA:
* 3.5G and WLAN connectivity
* Quadband GSM with GPRS and EDGE
* Data transfers over a cellular network 10/2Mbps
* Data transfers over Wi-Fi 54Mbps
* Flash 9.4 support
* Full-screen browsing
Dumbass.
Re:WiFi? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WiFi? (Score:4, Informative)
It does. "WLAN" - from the site:
Re:how much is it? (Score:5, Informative)
It's headed for T-Mobile. It cleared all the FCC requirements a few weeks ago and the specs list the 1700/2100 band that T-Mobie USA uses.
Re:how much is it? (Score:5, Informative)
specs are better than the iphone and the interface looks nice. how much is it? I think the $299 price point is the most that most people are willing to pay
How are these specs better then the iPhone 3GS? The 3GS contains:
Aside from the hardware keyboard, I'm not seeing how it's better hardware-wise.
Positioned as a high end device - not a phone. (Score:5, Informative)
Look at the N900 feature list [nokia.com] - "Phone" is fourth down.
Maemo may power Nokia's high-end devices, but this is no reason to sound the death knell for Symbian. With regard to Nokia, they make a lot of phones that are not the N900, and do not cost 500 euro. There are also dozens of other companies supporting the Symbian Foundation [wikipedia.org], including many other manufacturers like Samsung [samsungmobile.com] and Sony Ericsson [sonyericsson.com].
Symbian^4 will use Qt as its UI layer [tamoggemon.com], and Maemo is moving into a similar direction [maemo.org] (that's why Nokia bought Trolltech!) - targeting both platforms should be quite simple.
where your root prompt is (Score:5, Informative)
$ sudo gainroot [wordpress.com]
There it is!
Re:how much is it? (Score:3, Informative)
Built-in FM transmitter
Given that these are illegal in much of the world (although the relevant laws are not enforced for low-power transmitters), I wonder if this will limit adoption.
Re:Sigh (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_(computers)
FTL: "Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, refers to computer components, devices, and recording media that retain digital data used for computing for some interval of time."
elitist != superior. Please don't do that.
Re:how much is it? (Score:5, Informative)
specs are better than the iphone and the interface looks nice. how much is it? I think the $299 price point is the most that most people are willing to pay
How are these specs better then the iPhone 3GS? The 3GS contains:
Aside from the hardware keyboard, I'm not seeing how it's better hardware-wise.
Up to 1 GB of application memory (256 MB RAM, 768 MB virtual memory) .mp4; codec: MPEG-4 .mp4, .avi, .wmv, .3gp; codecs: H.264, MPEG-4, Xvid, WMV, H.263
Data transfers over a cellular network 10/2Mbps
Removable battery
Wide aspect ratio 16:9 (WVGA)
Video recording file format:
Video recording at up to 848x480 pixels (WVGA) and up to 25fps
Removable battery
Video playback file formats:
5 MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens and LED flash
3D graphics accelerator with OpenGL ES 2.0 support
Removable battery
32 GB internal storage
Expandable to up to 48 GB with external microSD card
Removable battery
800x480 resolution screen
Removable battery
There's more, but I'm tiered of copying and pasting. Don't get me wrong, the iPhone is nice, but these specs are better as far as I know (not sure about the widescreen). Oh, and there's a Removable battery
Re:Answers all my biggest iPhone gripes (Score:1, Informative)
5) No removable batteries
(The N900 has removable batteries)
Re:how much is it? (Score:4, Informative)
€ symbol is available by HTML entity: €
If you just poked it in by keyboard, I think slashcode will eat it.
Why? Cuz it's slashcode.
Skype? (Score:3, Informative)
The iPhone does have Skype now, you know. True, it's only allowed to work over the 802.11 connection, not the cellular, but it's definitely there.
Dan Aris
Re:how much is it? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No native Vorbis support... (Score:4, Informative)
Given this looks like a major upgrade from the existing Nokia tablets, this link [maemo.org] might fill in the gap
Fixes gripes about n810 (Score:4, Informative)
The n810 is great, except when you need to make a (non-skype) phone call.
The new keyboard looks good, although it will take me another 9 months to adjust to the new key layout.
The black plastic finish should take more of a beating (drops, in particular) compared to the metal finish of the current unit, but Man! It looks so thick! http://www.sizeasy.com/page/size_comparison/23639-Nokia-N810-vs-N97-vs-Nokia-N900 [sizeasy.com]
The diplay appears to be the same, which is great, unless you're viewing through polarized lenses. The biggest complaint I have with the n810 display is the PDA-class GPU. The PowerVR chip should turn things around. Is it the same core as in iPhone?
Good to see the stand present on the rear.
Alert me when the price & demand drop so I can pick one up for $250.
Re:FM "Transmitter"? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a low-powered FM transmitter, so that you can use it to play music over your in-car stereo without needing an interface cable.
Re:DO WANT (Score:2, Informative)
Keyboard missing a dedicated number row? Check.
UI a mishmash of whizzo gimmicks without much thought put into them? Check.
Instantly abandoned as soon as Nokia sees another shiny object? Check.
I want to like this thing. I do not. This is neither a BB nor an iPhone killer.
CDMA (Score:2, Informative)
You missed a big difference for people in the USA... Quoting the specifications page [nokia.com]
Operating frequency
* Quad-band GSM EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
* WCDMA 900/1700/2100 MHz
That's right. This device will be available with CDMA support. Which means that people in the US who are customers of carriers who didn't adopt GSM like everybody else in the world ( eg: Sprint, Verizon ) will, in theory, be able to use the phone, too.
And before you say that we should all "get with the program" and switch carriers to one that uses GSM, for many of us, for various reasons, it really isn't an option.
Re:No OGG Vorbis support (Score:1, Informative)
The regular OGG/vorbis library requires no special processor, but it uses floating point arithmetics, whereas mp3 uses only fixed point arithmetics. That makes ogg/vorbis a little bit battery consuming. However, there is a library called tremor, which uses fixed point to decode vorbis.
Re:No OGG Vorbis support (Score:3, Informative)
There is a fixed-point version of the Vorbis codec called Tremor. Floating point is nice but not required.
My piddly little iRiver T20 plays OGG just fine, and it's about 4 years old and runs off a single 900 mAh AAA battery for many hours. This has a 1320 mAh battery and processors that must be several generations better in terms of power consumption.
If you really needed floating point, you could probably leverage the integrated GPU anyway.
Re:No OGG Vorbis support (Score:5, Informative)
Re:CDMA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:CDMA (Score:4, Informative)
Also, I happen to live in one of the supposedly "Best" AT&T service islands in the middle of the vast empty area on the first map, and typing in my ZIP code on the AT&T "build your package" wizard returns a message that "this is one of the few areas we haven't reached yet."
Re:how much is it? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:CDMA (Score:4, Informative)
Re:how much is it? (Score:2, Informative)
Removable battery was mentioned in the parent. This should be redundant not insightful. Oh well, can't expect moderators to read posts before modding them can we?
Personally, I can't believe no one has mentioned the removable battery now that is a big deal!
Re:how much is it? (Score:3, Informative)
Slashcode supports UTF-8. Slashdot doesn't.
Look again (Score:3, Informative)
Maemo 5 aka Freemantle: http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/software-freedom-lovers-here-comes-maemo-5/ [wordpress.com]
Official Nokia Site: http://maemo.nokia.com/ [nokia.com]
Developer's Guide: http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/Maemo_5_Developer_Guide [maemo.org]
Forums: http://talk.maemo.org/forumdisplay.php?f=40 [maemo.org]
Re:Virtual memory on a phone's flash... (Score:3, Informative)
I have the N770 with only 128mg RAM, I get by very well and have not wore out my 1 gig flash by all that swapping. The apps are not from win32land, they are quite well suited to low memory. What the N770 lacks is CPU and the N900 delivers 600mhz (read: I am jealous!!). These Internet Tablets are very well designed and each revision is greatly improved. I am very happy to see a new model as I was worried that Nokia was throwing in the towel on Maemo, which is another great asset for this line.
Languages I detest, I detest for a reason. (Score:5, Informative)
Personally I don't care for Android because it's so Javafied. I really truly detest Java.
People who "detest" programming languages are posers.
How's that, exactly? Some of us have simply worked with a particular language or tool long enough to know some good reasons to hate it...
Personally I'm down with Java as a language, I just don't see the point of running everything through a VM on a pocket machine. Translate the app to native code when installing it to the phone or something, there's no point JITing or VMing the code at runtime.
Re:Supported Media Formats... (Score:3, Informative)
Surprised? You need to keep up on your geek news.
This is a NOKIA phone. Nokia is one of the two main companies that objected to OGG formats (vorbis & theora) being specified in the HTML5 spec. They aren't fully confident about the patent situation regarding OGG.
Re:Google n810/n800 GPS... (Score:2, Informative)
That's bollocks.
Not exactly. We bought two N810s for a project. The first one is extremely slow to get a fix. The second one, which was purchased several months later, establishes a fix MUCH more quickly.
In other words, it appears that you and the GP are both right.
Re:how much is it? (Score:1, Informative)
Multitasking.
800x480 resolution.
Multitasking.
Multitasking.
All the apps I use on my N800 are free (1000s of them) - no app-pay-me-store needed.
mplayer works.
Skype works.
Flash and javascript work.
Pidgin works.
Clam works.
rss feeds work.
I've never visited a website that didn't work, including the full Zimbra webmail with javascript.
Google Voice works.
Google Maps work.
GPS works without a cell tower around too.
Any questions?
Re:how much is it? (Score:2, Informative)
Also I am looking forward to see what the SDK looks like, never worked with Maemo before.
http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/Maemo_5_Developer_Guide [maemo.org]
Nokia also hosts VM images with the development environment already setup. http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/maemo-dev-env-downloads.php [nokia.com]
Re:Only compared to an iPhone (Score:4, Informative)
Uhh yes there is. What the heck are you talking about? You hold the home and power buttons simultaneously for a few seconds, ignore any on-screen shutdown prompt and it will do a hard reset. I'm laughing at you waiting till the battery drains to start using your phone...read the manual.