Software-part 2
You've got UI quirkiness to contend with, too. Maemo 5 dispenses of the left-anchored taskbar present in every version of Maemo before it, and even the status bar in the upper left (where you see time, signal strength, and so on) has a tendency to disappear rather frequently, leaving you without any bearing or sense of how to navigate between apps or elements of the platform. This is most clearly evident in the main menu, where you're presented with nothing but a full page of icons -- and it's not like the N900 has a front-mounted home or back button, so to a novice user, it's anyone's guess how to back out to the home screen or move to another app that's already running. As it turns out, the answer generally is to find a blank out-of-focus area and tap on it to go back one screen, but depending on the screen you're in, that occasionally leaves you hunting for a free area on which to tap. [You can also tap along the edge of the screen -- even if the home screen icon isn't visible -- and get back. -Ed.] Worst case, you can hit the power button up top to call up the profile menu, which will bump you out to the home screen underneath -- but it's not elegant by any stretch.
Speaking of UI quirkiness, this gets back to something we touched on earlier -- the N900's almost exclusive reliance on landscape mode. We get the argument that the 770, N800, and N810 didn't have portrait mode at all, but times have changed -- people walk and surf at the same time these days (particularly with devices like the N900 that have WWAN radios on board) and it's a lot more convenient if you can do that one-handed. Portrait mode, of course, lends itself to one-handed use. If you lump this in with Maemo 5's general usability roughness, you get the sense that the platform was rushed just a bit -- Nokia took it to 90 percent and said, "hey, this is open source, let's let the community fill in the blanks." We're guessing there are plenty of buyers that are delighted with that policy, but again, these are the kinds of things that keep Nokia from having a platinum best seller on its hands. Long term, it'll be interesting to see how close Maemo 6 comes to closing that gap and making the platform accessible to consumers at large.
About the only places the N900 officially supports portrait mode at this point are the Phone and Photos apps; you can hack it into the browser right now and we suspect the rest of the platform will get there soon enough, but we digress
It's a little weird, but we're thankful in at least one regard: the phone is the one piece of software here that absolutely, positively must be ready to use in portrait, particularly considering that the earpiece is at one end. As a phone, the N900's pretty basic -- again, Nokia considers this a MID with a phone bolted on, not the other way around -- but you get a finger-friendly keypad and full contact integration, which works swimmingly when paired with something like Google sync.
There is one key area where the N900's phone excels, though: Skype support. In fact, this is about the best Skype experience we've ever had on a mobile phone -- you add your account through the N900's control panel, which then keeps you connected and ready to take and place VoIP calls just as you would a GSM call. It's truly seamless and worked extraordinarily well. In fact, there was a point when we were on a GSM call and a Skype call came through on call waiting, which we could switch to and place the original caller on hold -- had we not known the caller was on Skype ahead of time, we wouldn't have been able to tell. Likewise, you can natively add contacts' Skype IDs in the address book. Ironically, the whole integration makes the N900 the closest the Internet Tablet series has ever been to not needing a GSM radio -- and yet it's the first to have one.
The N900 includes a Maemo build of OVI maps, a staple for most Nokia handsets sold today. Coming from Google Maps on Android and iPhone, Ovi Maps leaves a lot to be desired here. First up -- and this isn't Ovi Maps' fault, specifically -- we had an awful time with AGPS, which was totally unable to get even a rough lock without GPS line of sight. At this point, we're used to living in the world of instant location mapping that Google has brought to every platform that Google Maps has touched, and we really miss it here -- waiting for a satellite constellation is so 2005. As for the app itself, it's on par with something you might expect a couple years ago; it can map routes (and the latest firmware is supposed to speed that process substantially), but you don't have turn-by-turn navigation or cool add-ons like street view out of the box. Finally, map scrolling is one activity that's made measurably easier on a capacitive screen -- preferably with multitouch -- so no amount of user hacking or third-party development is going to fix that particular issue. On the plus side, the map renders quite quickly as you scroll (everything we tested on the N900 moved with hustle, really) and we appreciated the app's shortcuts for bouncing between common zoom levels (country, city, and so on).
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