Re: N900 specs revealed
 

I'm not sure I get it - what is it that you have to do at start and end of the session on the phone side? You can leave BT on at all times, just set it to non-broadcasting and it won't use any measurable power (I've got two phones, one is with BT on, i.e. the one I use with my N800, the other with BT off. The battery last equally long on both.)
And what is it you have to do on the NIT side? Either I explicitly turn networking on, and then selecting the phone is no different from selecting a wi-fi network, or I just start an application which needs networking and it'll do it automatically.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

My phone and tablet are already authorized for automatic bluetooth pairing. If not, there would be yet more steps. I believe I have seen the fact that you have to manually connect the phone to the Internet called a security "feature".

It should also be said that before I updated (to diablo?) at one time, the NAT hack was somewhat different, and there was no "dummy connection".

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Does your phone not offer you the choice of relaxing this security? My crummy Motorola iDEN phone defaults to "Ask" for access by paired Bluetooth devices, but for each device I can easily change that setting to "Automatic".

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

If you have a look at what the list of steps was, you will see that most of them were to start (connect) ICS. ICS does not start automatically. It has to be enabled and will disable itself when not in use.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Ah! That's...disappointing.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Organizations tend to make decisions as fuzzy as possible because it helps keep dissent to a minimum. There are exceptions, of course.

Since Nokians aren't labled, I might be wrong about which is a Nokian and which is a maemoite. I can't give a definitive list of which is which. There are definitely people throwing their weight around who weren't doing that when ITT existed as a separate entity; at least, they weren't doing that on ITT.

There were also people always throwing their weight around on ITT, but there are more of them now. That's my sense of things.

What are those lines from Yeats' The Second Coming: the worst are full of passionate intensity, the best are unsure? I know that is inaccurate, but it is the correct idea. What rough beast slouches toward Nokia, waiting to be born (the N900, obviously)?

I'm too lazy to look it up now.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

I can also make it ask for access by a paired Bluetooth device. This would be in addition. The N810 has full bluetooth access. If my phone was WM5, I could have gone online without starting that process from the cell phone.

The added security makes somewhat sense, you may not want to let everyone use your expensive mobile internet even if you let them connect to your phone via bluetooth. However, in actual use, the way they implemented DUN was much easier to use.

Anyway, the point is not to fix the annoyances of ICS@WM6, the point is that with an all-in-one device, you would not have to.

Edit: you don't have to now either, really. Let me rephrase that to "With an all-in-one device, you won't have to deal with the multiplicity of connection issues with all the cell phone platforms and models out there."

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

It's not about battery, it's about security. Leaving BT on all the time is just asking for trouble. (I live in an area where people routinely drive around doing wifi war-driving ... BT isn't that much more obscure, or that much harder to hack)

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Oh, and, for me, it was a Nokia phone, not a WinMo phone. I still found myself doing tons of juggling back and forth. Turn on and off Bluetooth on both devices. Start the connection. Got a text message; answer it. Go back to the NIT. Got another text message; answer it. Go back to the NIT. Got a phone call. Go back to the NIT. Got a text message; answer it. Go back to the NIT.

Even if you're careless about security so that you eliminate those parts ... it's still too much device juggling.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

If this is a cell phone and it thrumps the N97 as Nokias most advanced smart phone... Did anyone else beside me speculate about the price for such a phone? Tablet prices are no longer relevant in such a scenario.

What are we talking about, £600?

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Yup, I'm sure that Maemo (not the Mer derivative) has not been available to others for licensing and that was not because of price. I don't know if it will be available in the future.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

If it has everything the N97 has, but has touch screen implemented better, better internet browsing, better OS through Maemo that has the functionality + eye candy + kinetic scrolling and good support, that price would be fine, and expected.

I am waiting for them to release the specs coz the N97 doesnt do it for me.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Who approached them, and was rejected?

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

More headlines fun.

It's probably a good thing that this will be an N series phone and not an O series phone. Otherwise there's the risk of something like this:

ASUS O!Play HDP-R1 media player won't likely get an O-face

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

When BT is in 'invisible' mode it isn't transmitting at all. It is only a receiver. It would not be possible to detect that it is there unless you are at the time communicating with it, so for a 3party person it does not make any difference if it is 'on' in receiver mode, or not, when you yourself isn't currently communicating through BT.

So an attacker would first have to collect info about your phone while you're using BT actively, and could then at a later time try to connect to your listen-only BT. In both cases they would have to get close to you (10 meters) (yes I know about the special long-range narrow-angle BT cracker's antenna.. not very practical for war-driving really).

So yes, there's a possibility for breaking into your BT phone, but not as easy as war-driving for open (or wep-protected) wi-fi access points: The area of near-enough for potential break-ins is vastly larger for wi-fi than for BT, and can usually be done in one go instead of first collecting info and then coming back later.

I choose to consider that risk very low, so I ignore it and leave my BT on (in invisible mode), but of course everyone is free to judge the risk differently. (BT in visible mode is an entirely different story of course -- that can be extremely problematic. For example, a student's pub I visited tried to automatically push some kind of advertisements to every BT device visible in the building. Very annoying.)

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Indeed. Another one ticked on my list of features not to look for in a phone.

Agreed. With a usage pattern like that it could add up to a lot of juggling. Which just goes to show that there's a reason some of us end up in the one-device camp and some of us in the two-devices camp. I, for example, very rarely get messages or phone calls on the phone I use for BT connectivity, in the time windows where I actually use BT instead of wi-fi (I get most of those calls when I'm in places where there is wi-fi).

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Even without special antennas... within 10 meters of where I live, charge my phone, etc., there are 6-87 other homes (and also at least have some degree of tech gadgetry, and are sophisticated enough to use better than WEP protection on their wifi access points ... and actually have it turned on). And I don't even live in any kind of ultra-high density housing -- I'm in a front/3br unit of a 4plex condominium, with two other such units close by. And this doesn't even count all of the people from the surrounding condos who park in or near my building.

Further, I'm within 10 meters of a semi-busy road (in the heart of silicon valley, not far from Ebay's headquarters ... so it wouldn't surprise me to have war-drivers going by regularly), I travel along busy roads on my commute, and I work on campus at a university ... across the parking lot from the computer science/computer engineering building (ie. every student hacker, whether they're curious vs malicious).

AND ... I work, indirectly, with personal information (I don't work with it directly, but the systems I maintain at work do store it). So, my job requires me to be diligent/paranoid about my devices being secured ... and one of my main uses for my pocketable device is: emergency remote maintenance of my servers.

10 meters is not a "safety" zone for me. If I could tell all of my BT devices to truly be a personal area network (1-1.5 meter max range), that'd be different. But 10 meters? way too big.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

I only carry the one phone. Even if I carried two (one for tethering, and one for communicating), it wouldn't change that part of the problem -- no matter which device is the voice/txt device, given my job, I have to answer it ... or at least check it to be sure it's not likely to be an important call/message. Which means juggling the tablet and phone every time I get a message/call, unless they're the same device. That got old REALLY quick.

And that doesn't mean I dismiss the multi-device camp. The Unix way is specialized systems that interconnect to leverage each other's specializations. I love and respect that. But, in order for it to work for me, only one of those devices can be my "user interface" (email, rss, web, ssh, vnc, phone, sms, im, etc.). Having a mifi/cradlepoint device* that was also an SMS gateway and SIP server with decent battery life, and having a tablet that supports that mode of operation, would in fact be very compelling to me (assuming strong enough security between the devices). Other compelling pieces of such an environment would be a pocket-wireless-NAS (BT hard drives, for example ... which have yet to be released in the US, as far as I can tell), a Tekkeon type battery for keeping the devices charged, and a camera that can utilize/inter-operate all of those. However, several pieces of that puzzle are missing. Especially the security component.

(* it could even itself be a phone ... but the most I've seen in a phone, for fulfilling this role, is various low-security wifi data router options ... no voice/sms service routing)

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

I think it's pretty clear now that what we could all agree on is that Nokia should make at least 2 new devices: The phone-oriented, uber-smartphone all-in-one device (which is what we believe the "N900") is, and a no-phone, tablet-like device (it could have room for the slightly larger screen, and should be way cheaper too). Approaching the form factor from two different sides as it were.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

MOVE! ... Just using some of your logic from the following post.:)

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Exactly! I fully agree and I think thats the direction in which the Market segments will be split, given the rumors of an Apple Tablet, then Android being ported too. So it may be a bigger device, bigger than what we previously thought.

I cant wait for the phone....everyone is churning out phones left right and center, I really hope this is the quiet before a storm.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

How disappointed will some be if it turns out the N900 will not be shipped as a conventional voice phone?

HSPA data may be all the thing is capable of... out of the box . ;) I could see a service provider like T-Mo offering data only subsidies for something like this on worldwide scale.

Didn't Sprint plan to do the same with the N810 WiMAX before Nokia pulled the plug?

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

*laugh* my own words used against me... oh the humanity!

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

for me, I'd like to see 3 devices...

1) phone (prefer 4.1" touch screen, but 3.x" is acceptable, physical thumb keyboard is a must)
2) pocketable tablet (4-5" touch screen is a must)
3) nonpocketable tablet (7-10" screen, pref. 9"... pref. convertible tablet netbook, but ultimately the physical kbd is optional for me on this one as long as it has a USB host port for a kvm and/or usb keyboard ... would be a good counterpart to the kindle, netbooks, and Apple's rumored device)


I didn't put that a physical thumb keyboard is a must on #2, though, because I wont be buying a non-phone pocketable.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

I like 3) there. Someone is bound to come out with a color Kindle-like thing that can also play movies. I think that the movie aspect would make a lot of people forget about that e-ink stuff. And you know the company that should do it? Netflix has enough money...

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Absolutely.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Well... Then I'd expect a much lower price. And it would have to bring something new to the table. Like Java :B

I don't think it would sell that much, since it would require a seperate SIM card to work, and people would most likely have to get a seperate subscription for it. However, it would be easier to connect to mobile internet, for those of us who don't have DUN support on our phones.

But yeah. If there was no voice then I don't understand the choices made. And I always understand the choices made ;)

Edit: I will also be disappointed if it only has 3G+ and not Edge.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

We know from Texrat that they're making _some_ device in that category, and it sounds like it's a netbook. And, I've been saying I'd love to see a netbook, especially a convertible tablet netbook... but when I think about what things I really want/need in that category, what things that format really has as strengths, how I'd use it, etc. (how I use my current ubuntu netbook, and what things I find lacking in it) ... what I come up with is that the "tablet" part of "convertible tablet netbook" is more important to me than the "netbook" part.

If, in portrait mode, you could have the virtual thumb keyboard take up less than half the screen, then that would remove one of my major objections to the virtual thumb keyboard (that you can't see the app while you're typing). And, what I find with the netbook is that, when I'm mobile, I don't really "type" on it, I just hunt and peck (since I'm holding it snugly with one arm, and only have one hand free to "type") ... and when I get to a place where I can sit down and TYPE on it, I pull out a folding USB keyboard so I have a REAL full size keyboard for fast typing. If this netbook was a convertible tablet, with a decent virtual keyboard, I wouldn't be surprised if I _never_ used its built-in keyboard.

So, that lead me to the conclusion that while I might value the flexibility of a convertible tablet netbook ... I'd also probably end up being perfectly happy with a plain non-pocketable tablet of this same screen size (9" ... I have a dell vostro a90, which is basically an all black dell mini 9).

It makes me that much more interested in the Always Innovating Touchbook ... if Nokia's "netbook" turns out to just be a plain netbook.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10252373-94.html
Now, there is something special.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Brand new leaked photo of N900. It's a phone!
http://s52.radikal.ru/i137/0906/17/5ee8aa0122c9.jpg

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Hardware looks nice. OS look feasible. You should give the source of where you got the image from though.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

He will be fired and then killed if I'll tell you :)
Well, ok, just another Rickrolling from me :) Handmade mockup :)

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

nice try, you forgot the arrow keys. and rickroll link too

edit: he was too fast confessing

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

LOL a new word appears in the Lexicon

Rickroll (noun)
1. Nonsense; tomfoolery.
2. A hoax.
3. A gentle satirical imitation; a light parody.
4. A spoof

To Rickroll (verb)
1. To deceive.
2. To do a spoof
3. Satirize gently.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

I was told that some good people from Nokia can have problems cause of that, so I'd better confess now :)

Video about N900 and maemo5
 

check out this video about N900 and maemo5 too:

http://www.newlc.com/en/n900-upcomin...o5-omap3-watch

will this device use ofono too ?

http://www.newlc.com/en/ofono-open-s...phony-solution

I cant wait

Re: Video about N900 and maemo5
 

He pronounces "May-mo". Oh, infidel! :p

Regarding the comments before about the price, if it really launches at €600, man, what a wasted opportunity. All the comments before about bringing it mainstream, building a bigger user-base, helping Maemo become more widespread and out-of-the-box usable... Forget it. At €600, just not gonna happen.

Now imagine if it shipped for $399, with a nice cd with Nokia Software for easily (really EASILY) syncing media with Windows, Linux, Mac (yeap, it's doable. The Pre syncs with Itunes out-of-the-box). Imagine maybe a flickr/facebook/ovi joint subscription for sharing pictures (already doable in Symbian with Shozo, dunno if they can pull it off), youtube for sharing videos, etc., and that nice, 3.5" screen with Maemo (something that I don't think any other smartphone can offer so far). It would just change the world as we know it. I would be exhilarated to buy one, even if I'm partial for my 4". Everybody here would jump at one. Half the world would want to jump at one.

And I dunno about the US Market, but is T-Mobile seen as something better than AT&T and the others? Is it 'less hated'? Also, how does this T-mobile attachment thing hold out for outside-US releases?

Re: Video about N900 and maemo5
 

In Nokia Currency Conversion those are the same amount :(

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

this may give the wrong impression to readers here.

if done the way it was intended to work (bluetooth DUN), there is not one single step necessary after the initial pairing. you pull out you tablet and start surfing.

i assume all you write applies to unDUN phones; that's some sort of hack anyway.

Re: N900 specs revealed
 

Absolutely absolutely !