Nokia N900 Review: Not an Ordinary Person’s Phone

        Calling and Reception
Overall, phone calls are very clear and the phone never drops calls. The dial pad is nice and big and making calls in general is very simple and straight forward. The only thing that we’ve noticed is that on occasion the phone can freeze when an incoming call arrives and it is effectively impossible to pick up the call until it has already stopped ringing. When using the phone’s speakerphone we can hear people extremely easily and it is probably the loudest speakerphone we’ve ever heard on a phone. Also, people had no issues hearing us at all even when we held the phone away from our head when using speakerphone. Overall, we were extremely surprised with the call quality considering that this is sold as more of a Mobile Internet Device[MID] rather than a smartphone.

The phone supports GSM 850/800/1800 and 1900MHz frequencies. It also supports GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, WCDMA and HSPA 10mbit. The phone does not support HSPA+ but should still benefit from the speed increases of HSPA+ network upgrades. Unfortunately for us, as far as we know there are no HSPA+ networks available in our local area to test speeds.



        Web Browsing
The web browser on the N900 is probably the best browser we’ve seen on any phone that came before or after. The N900’s browser has supported full flash since day one which was months ahead of Android 2.2 and other updates. The overall usability of the browser is great and it is very similar to a desktop experience. Because of this, when browsing sites like Facebook… some people are baffled to see a fully fledged Facebook page on the N900 even including Facebook chat which is already integrated into the device’s IM protocols. The PC-like keyboard shortcuts make using the N900 and the browser almost an identical experience to using a computer which really makes the N900 shine as a mini-computer. In more than one instance friends had asked me to borrow the N900 so that they could go onto their bank’s website as their phones had issues supporting the bank’s website. On top of that, since the browser can run flash 9.4 and was developed using Mozilla’s engine, there are add-ons that you can install for it much like Firefox itself. These include add-on like ad block, etc.


BSN* in the Maemo Browser by Mozilla


Extensions and Plug-ins just like Firefox

Nokia has also built-in tethering into this device since it isn’t custom made for any carrier and as such the only requirement for tethering is to have the Nokia software installed and the phone plugged in via USB. There are also some wifi sharing [mobile hotspot] applications available but those are 3rd party and not native to the N900. The application that we used [mobile hotspot] also requires a special kernel to enable usage, but it does work.