The first thing, and perhaps the most prominent thing, that a user sees regardless of device or operating system is the home screen. Coming from S60 5th Edition's restrictive grid-based widget placement, you might expect some limitations on the N900 -- but you'd be wrong. In fact, the N900 has one of the most extensible, customizable home screens of any mobile device we've ever used; you can drop widgets, bookmarks, and contacts exactly where you want them right down to the pixel, and you've got a total of four panels that loop around as you swipe (unlike Android, which stops in either direction). The system works well and does a great job of maximizing the handset's available screen real estate.
Tapping the icon in the upper left takes you to the main menu (more on that in a moment) or, if you've got any apps minimized, a display that Nokia calls the "dashboard." Basically, it's yet another interpretation of the so-called "card interface" popularized by webOS, and it works well here -- you see miniaturized views of all your open applications in one place. Minimized applications smoothly glide into the grid of cards, and tapped cards smoothly glide open to full screen again -- a testament to the power of the N900's hardware, we suspect.
Beyond the home screen, system notifications are a pretty hot topic, too, considering how well Android and webOS handle them and how poorly the iPhone does by comparison. Fortunately, Maemo 5 does a pretty great job here. New text messages, emails, and the like are briefly displayed as a yellow bubble in the upper left of the display; tapping it will take you right to the source of the notification (the new SMS, for example). If you let it go, though, the notification will persist as a "card" within the N900's multitasking dashboard, taking up the same space that a normal application would. You might think this would be confusing, but it's not for a very simple reason -- notifications appear as bright yellow squares, the same color as when they first appeared. So unless you've got an app minimized here with an entirely yellow background, you won't have any confusion.
If nothing else, Maemo 5 is pretty -- Nokia's prettiest platform ever, in fact, by a wide margin. We're sure that's due in no small part to the fact that the N900 is the first in the company's Internet Tablet line to employ a modern ARM Cortex A8-based core, making screen transitions and effects fast enough to accomplish their intended function: beautify the UI without sapping away precious seconds of the user's time. Out-of-focus screen elements are actually visually out of focus, which looks great (photographers, think "nice bokeh" here) and applications zoom and fade as you open, close, and minimize them.
"Pretty" doesn't cut it, though -- at least, not without a healthy dose of usability and functionality to go along with it, and in this regard, the N900 is much, much more raw. Indeed, Nokia has been surprisingly (and wisely) forthcoming about the fact that this is not a smartphone for the masses; it's for tweakers, hackers, geeks, nerds, and people who want as much control on their handheld device as possible -- and aren't afraid to get their hands dirty in the process. In fact, we'd go so far as to say that the N900 is a proof of concept -- a reference platform for Maemo that just happens to be sold in stores. Evidence of the N900's geeky aspirations are strewn about the platform from the X Terminal icon preloaded in the main menu, to the lack of an app store at launch (more on this shortly), to the fact that you need to connect the handset to a PC and run shell commands just to perform a hard reset.
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