Speaking of Ovi, how about the OVI Store? We just had a little bit of time to play with the live beta of Nokia's Maemo port of the Store which went live shortly before this review, and at this point, it's a little undercooked (hence the "beta" label, we suppose). The most glaring deficiency is in the usability of the UI; rather than make an actual Ovi Store app, Nokia has elected to simply point users to a mobile-optimized portal in the browser, which ultimately leads to more scrolling and tapping than you'd like. That's not the end of the world, though; the bigger problem in the short term is the availability of actual... you know, apps. We searched for a few common phrases ("IRC," for example) and were met with zero results; in all, the store has fewer than 100 assets as of press time, and many of those are images, videos, and themes rather than actual applications. Over the years, Internet Tablet users have grown accustomed to getting their free, open wares over both official and unofficial repositories, and injecting the Ovi Store's layer of commercialism in there is a new step that might not gel at first with folks upgrading from N800s and N810s -- that said, it's an absolutely vital step to taking Maemo mainstream, so we hope Nokia finds some creative ways to attract more high-profile devs to the platform.
Now, finally, let's talk about this handset's real treat, its crown jewel: the glorious browser. The Internet Tablet line has used a fairly capable Mozilla-based browser for ages, but between the latest tweaked code and the N900's thoroughly freshened internals, it's gone to an entirely new level. Almost without fail, sites were rendered faithfully (just as you'd expect them to look in Firefox on your desktop) with fully-functional, usable Flash embeds -- and it's fast. Not only is the initial rendering fast, but scrolling around complex pages (Engadget's always a good example) was effortless; you see the typical grid pattern when you first scroll into a new area, of course, but it fills in with the correct content rapidly. To say we were blown away by the N900's raw browsing power would be an understatement -- in fact, we could realistically see carrying it in addition to another phone for browsing alone, because even in areas where it gives a little ground to the iPhone or Pre in usability, it smacks everyone down in raw power and compatibility. In our line of work where 24 / 7 access to the web is of paramount importance, having the N900 in our pocket when we were away from our laptop was a comforting insurance policy. As with Ovi Maps, the one complaint we'd lodge here is that capacitive multitouch would've been a huge win, but we adopted to the resistive setup without too much drama -- and the inclusion of a creative "swirl to zoom" gesture certainly mitigates the problem. Just don't lose the stylus!
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