It's crystal clear by now that the Nokia N900 has almost nothing to do with the traditional Nseries values. The full QWERTY side-slider may look similar to its double-digit mates but the Maemo experience is completely different. However, the N900 is not there for the mere sake of difference - a tablet and a phone, it tries to get the best of both worlds. The large high-res display and great typing skills are the right kind of backup but we've seen plenty of similar packages already. It's a Maemo-powered phone with Mozilla browsing and all-you-can-eat connectivity. Call it good news, call it a good start or just call it good. Let's see if it calls back.

Design and Ergonomics.
The N900 has a side-slider design with a full QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard has fairly low key travel but the keys are clicky and you can turn on sound effects for key presses which helps. The combined camera launcher and shutter button are on the right side for natural placement when held like a camera. The power button, midway down the right side turns off the phone when pressed and held and with a short press brings up a set of menus to switch to offline mode, lock the screen and keys (the phone automatically locks when the slider is closed and you unlock it with an on-screen slider or the hardware slider), switch to silent mode and when in an application there's a menu item to bring up the phone dialer. The volume keys are on the upper right and the hardware screen/key lock is on the bottom along with the micro USB port and 3.5mm stereo headset jack. A front-facing VGA camera lives above the display, but the phone currently doesn't support 3G video calling and there are no VoIP apps that currently support video calling (we'd love to see video calling via Skype!). Open the door and the camera application automatically launches.

Multimedia.
Older Maemo Internet tablets were picky about video file formats but the N900 is the swiss army knife of mobile video playback. It can handle MPEG4, Flash Video, AVI, 3GPP, H.264 and WMV formats. The N900's multimedia player reminds us of the clean and simple Sony/Sony Ericsson UI with a large icon-based launcher for songs, video, Internet radio and song shuffle playback. The main UI tells you how many songs, video tracks and Internet radio stations are available/stored on the 32 gig flash drive and microSD card. The music player starts with a large album cover view that's attractive and modern. Internet radio worked well for us over T-Mobile's 3G HSDPA connection and WiFi. The phone has an FM transmitter so you can stream audio to your car or home stereo but there's no FM radio application. Happily, there's a basic FM radio app available for free download and it gets good reception.

Camera.
The 5 megapixel camera has a Carl Zeiss Tessar autofocus lens and a dual LED flash. We like the active lens cover that protects and launches the camera application when you slide it open (and exits the camera when you close the lens cover). The camera button functions as the shutter button, which is more stable than tapping on the display like the HTC HD2. When shooting video, the lens does an initial focus on the center of the frame rather than using a fixed focus on infinity. The N900's images are comparable to the N95 and N96's, and are far superior to the HTC HD2's.

Phone and Internet.
As per usual with Nokia phones, the N900 has excellent reception and call quality. It does have speed dialing, reliable voicemail notifications (though the number 1 isn't automatically assigned to voicemail, but should be in a future firmware), call history and an impressive selection of well-integrated Internet calling services. From the standard phone dialer you can make calls using Google Talk, Skype, Ovi, Jabber and SIP. Simply enter your login credentials in the phone account setup screen and select a contact to call. You'll see options for cellular calling and any VoIP internet calling services you've set up. Select a contact, and assuming you've got email, mobile, land line and etc. entered for that contact, you can tap buttons to call the person, Internet call that person, SMS them, email them and so on. Contact fields generally mirror Outlook with multiple email addresses, phone numbers, note, job title, nickname, web page and physical addresses. Bluetooth headsets were a mixed bag. We found that the Plantronics Discovery 925 and the Plantronics Discovery 655 both had good voice quality for incoming and outgoing calls. The Samsung WEP870 sounded overly digitized and hard to understand on the outgoing end and the Jabra Stone sounded just OK. The Jawbone 2 sounded tinny on the incoming end and distorted for outgoing voice. If you're totally into the web, this is your phone. The Mozilla-based browser handles AJAX, Javascript, frames, CSS and most everything a desktop browser does. The browser works with the desktop version of youtube.com and with youtube videos embedded in web pages (such as the page you're reading now). While Nokia S60 phones have offered Flash support, their low resolution and slow performance hampered the experience. Nice! Web pages look like their desktop counterparts and you get the desktop version of the New York Times, CNN and BBC rather than mobile versions.

Email.
The email client supports POP, IMAP, gmail and Exchange email (via Mail for Exchange). The phone supports HTML email, checking email on a schedule and checking email only when a certain connection is available (i.e.: WiFi). Google sync of contacts and calendar items over Mail for Exchange is sadly not supported. PC Suite syncing (not the newer Ovi desktop sync) works well with Outlook in Windows, but there's no iSync plugin for Mac OS X.

GPS and Ovi Maps.
No, there's no Google Maps, at least not yet. But Ovi Maps has attractive and clear maps, good US POIs and passable turn-by-turn on-screen directions. Will spoken directions come in a later Ovi Maps release, will 3rd parties release navigation applications for Maemo 5? In the meanwhile, Ovi Maps' price is hard to beat: free.

Key features.
* 3.5" 16M-color resistive touchscreen of WVGA (800 x 480 pixel) resolution
* Maemo 5 OS
* State-of-the-art Mozilla-based web browser with Adobe Flash 9.4 support
* Slide-out three-row full QWERTY keyboard
* ARM Cortex A8 600MHz CPU, PowerVR SGX graphics accelerator; 256 MB of RAM
* Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G support
* 5 MP autofocus camera with dual-LED flash and active camera lens cover
* WVGA (848 x 480 pixels) video recording @ 24fps
* 10 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA support
* Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS
* 32GB onboard storage
* DivX and XviD video playback
* Foldable kickstand
* microSD card slot with microSDHC support
* Built-in accelerometer
* Proximity sensor
* 3.5 mm audio jack and TV-out
* FM Radio receiver, FM transmitter
* microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
* Solid audio quality
* Kinetic scrolling
* Contacts integration of Skype, Google Talk and other VoIP services
* Great build quality

Main disadvantages.
* Large and heavy
* UI only works in landscape mode (for now)
* No smart and voice dialing
* Outdated camera interface and features
* No preinstalled voice-guided SatNav application
* No voice recorder, no MMS, and no handwriting recognition
* No FM radio application (despite that the hardware's there)
* Limited third-party software availabilty
* Limited 3G support in the US (no AT&T)

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