Nokia N900 Review: Not an Ordinary Person’s Phone

Value
The N900 currently does not sell subsidized through any carriers in the US and as a result is only available through retailers, etailers, and directly from Nokia. The good thing about this phone is that the prices have gone down significantly since its original announcement and launch. Initially, the N900 sold for $650 but is now available for $450. Also, Nokia has improved their global availability of this device and by this point has made it available in most major markets across the world. When it comes to the actual value that this device provides, we would have to say that based on the price it sells for and the features it has, it would be over priced to sell at $450 considering the complete lack of manufacturer support on the application side of things. The fact that the phone has a built-in transmitter adds value as those can run in excess of 80 to 90 dollars each. So, overall, this device has quite a lot of innovative features packed into it that make it a good value for your money if the device performs as promised.

Conclusion
As we said in the beginning, the N900 is not the everyday man’s device. Through using this phone, we’ve realized that there is no way that this phone would ever gain mainstream adoption. The problems that keep that from happening are mostly to do with the lack of publicly available and Nokia approved applications as well as the amount of bugs that still exist within the device. The N900 has a lot of great innovative features for its time and to this point still has a lot of things over the majority of its competitors. Nokia’s decision to almost leave this device dead in the water has undoubtedly hurt the device’s success but even so, there are still tens of millions of downloads from the community supported applications repositories on maemo.org. As with many devices with a lot of potential, without the community… the device is bunk. This sort of reminds me of Windows Mobile back when I ran it a year or so ago, except Maemo5 isn’t nearly as broken as Windows Mobile was… it just lacked the similar support from Microsoft in regards to applications and such.

The N900 is much like other open source projects out there, they have a lot of good intentions and give developers quite a bit of room to work with, but ultimately don’t gain much market acceptance. In the end, if you know how to program and want full access to your device without even having to really ‘crack’ it… the N900 is for you. But if you want a phone with no bugs that just works no questions asked; then the N900 is not for you. The sky is the limit with the N900 but it still has bumps along the way.

In regards to awards, we really wanted to give the Nokia N900 an innovation award but the device is still too buggy to be considered award worthy.