Hey, folks

Just back from a brief trip to NY and I had a chance to taste the N900, which was on display at their Manhattan Nokia store. I actually was hoping I could buy it, but they told me it was not in production yet and that they had no dates for when that will happen! :-(

Anyways, I was able to spend a few minutes playing around with it, obviously not in any depth, but enough to get a feel of the looks, the UI, and a bit of the functionality.

In terms of looks, I found it a bit big, but in a good way. The phone feels solid and like a reliable piece of hardware, nothing like certain HTCs... ;-)

As far as the UI goes, I guess that's what left me a bit cold. It does have a definitive GTK linux feel to it, but felt a bit poor to me. I guess it looked poor in the same way a Gnome desktop does right after installation. When that happens in a desktop, it is not that big a deal, most of the times the person installing was planning to change everything anyways.

However, in a phone... I don't know, I feel lots of people will feel interested about the N900 simply because it is a high end Nokia phone, because they want to have the latest and greatest... But when they look at it and compare it to an iPhone or perhaps an HTC Hero with Android, they are probably going to feel like the N900 is ugly as hell... ;-) I guess I was expecting a bigger and more sleek work as far as the UI goes, I felt a bit disappointed.

Another element that caught my attention was the speed in moving from menu to menu, when opening applications, etc. While it was much faster than any symbian phone I have used, it seemed slow when compared to how the new iPhone and some Android phones I have seen. It was nothing major, just a bit in loading stuff, but I guess my expectations were very high considering the power and the fact that it is a "real" Linux heart inside.

Anyways, it's not much, I know, but like I was saying, I just had a few minutes, and I wanted to share my impressions.

I would have thought your expectations would be lower, knowing it has full Linux inside compared to the iPhone which is BSD stripped down.

How much stuff was running when you were playing with it? You have to consider the iPhone when you move from one application to the next, it closes the application. The N900 however may need to swap because it doesn't close unless you ask it to do so.

You would also need to consider how old the firmware was that the unit was running. If it's been in the store for a couple of months it surely has a very early build of firmware, thus slow and not optimized.

wow you came to a very quick conclusion from "briefly tryin a n900" suddenly turned in to a UI expert and did you do side by side comparisons with all the other device OS's you mention, thought so its just guess work and conclusion from trying a pre-production model

This is a reason I wish the OS dropped off some active apps into a register and then reactivated them if you pressed the icon for it.

Seems inefficient leaving all of the apps live and then new users trying or seeing a demo get the impression the N900 is slow.

It shouldn't slow down just because it's multitasking. I always have lots of stuff running on my N800, this doesn't make any difference to running a single application, it feels just the same (until I run out of memory of course). We don't need any hacks like you suggest.

If things looked slow it's much more likely caused by an old version of the software, as has already been suggested.

What and where do you do the command to show firmware version. I can drop by the NYC Nokia store and find out the version.

Settings -> About product

Hi all!

Good to see so many replies...

Like I said originally, it was just a few minutes, so you are right I had no clues about the OS version, but it was capable of browsing the web, it was connected. Would that keep the OS updates in synch that way? (Sorry, I am not really sure how OS updates will be managed eventually...)

I didn't say I had any expert impressions, in fact I repeated many times it was just based on a few minutes, and I was comparing my initial impressions on all three models (as I had a chance to play around with an HTC hero, and iPhone 3GS and the Nokia N900).

The main thing is that my comparison was just about that, about my first impression. Let's face it: how many people buy an iPhone because of an expert view? How many know its (very impressive) technical prowess? Most people out there buy an iPhone because it looks great, both in terms of UI and hardware, and because it works great.

All I am saying is that I got the feeling that the N900 was working well, but I can hardly believe people will feel attracted to those menus, icons, etc. the way they do to those of an iPhone, and that could impact how it sells (hopefully not)

That is not an expert view, just my personal oppinion.

Why are there always so many negative responses whenever someone isn't 100% happy with the phone. It seems like people only want to hear reviews of praise and worship rather then information that may help the product get better in the future.

I haven't used the phone so I can't comment on most of the stuff he mentioned. However I have been playing with the sdk so I'm familiar with the gui and visually it is not on par with other products on the market. You don't have to be a "GUI Expert" to know that....