“It’s turning out to be a busy week for Nokia. Days in advance of NokiaWorld in Stuttgart, and a couple of days after lifting the curtain on its first netbook, Nokia has announced the Nokia N900, the successor to its almost four-year-old lineup of Internet Tablets. The N900 follows in the footsteps of the N810 with its slide out keyboard, but adds for the first time built-in 3G (Nokia calls it 3.5G) functionality, making the N900 the first Nokia tablet with the ability to go online without a WiFi connection or cellphone pairing. It’s also the first Nokia device to run Maemo 5, Nokia’s homegrown Linux distro.”
3.5G is not a marketing term Thom, it means a slightly higher max speed AFAIK. 3G is around 3 Mb/s and 3.5G is 7.2 Mb/s and I believe there^aEURTMs even a 3.75 G, but I don^aEURTMt know offhand what that speed is something like 11, or 21. (although I may be understanding that wrong as I have absolutely no background in telecommunications; is there a guru in the house?)
Edited 2009-08-27 17:53 UTC
…?
Marketing term? Thom? This is a summary by Ars, not me.
Yeah, as Thom says this is Ars, though it’s not actually attributed in the OSAlert summary.
3.5G is an enhancement (HSPA) of a third generation technology (UMTS).
As an Android owner and a Qt developer I can only say: “Go Nokia!”. Although I honestly believed that Nokia was finished when I first saw Android, I hope that they will succeed with this platform. Qt is by far the best C++ framework out there, combined with the great hardware…
It could be a winner for Nokia.
It would be great if they adapted Android to run in this device. So they would have Linux (C++, Qt, python, etc)+Java+Android.
To much bloat.
Certainly someone (google?) can make it happen, but it’s unlikely to come from Nokia ;-).
Google does not want it to happen. Google chose to build a totally new toolkit that’s incompatible to everything else on purpose.
Maemo OTOH uses GTK, Clutter and Qt.
Though the current Maemo revision is GTK not QT yet. I believe Maemo 6 is slated to be QT.
Maemo 5 does ship with Qt 4.5, so you can write your apps in it. Gtk-based Hildon is the “native” UI for this device though, and all the bundled programs are written using it.
It’s also perfectly possible to write most of your app (backend) using Qt, and then slap a Gtk UI on top of it.
Nokia is going to be switching to QT in the next OS update Maemo5.1 (or 6?) The part number at this point is known (RX-71) will be QT, not GTK. FYI
No, nokia did release a version of the N810 with 3G data connectivity built in. Called it the wimax. Still couldn’t make normal voice calls, but you could use the internet from anywhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N810#Nokia_N810_WiMAX_Edition
WIMAX != 3G. WIMAX is pretty much a technology that didn’t happen (yet, at least).
Sorry, my mistake. Sprint calls wimax 4G. Its completely different.
Does anyone know how long it can run on batteries?
one day of “active online usage”, 9hs of talk time (on GSM)
http://www.nokia.com/NOKIA_COM_1/Press/Materials/White_Papers/pdf_f…
beats the hell out of my (Windows Mobile based, more expensive) Touch Pro!
Really want one of these but my contract provider, who have the best data rates in Spain by a long mile, don’t do subsidised phones… Then again, they don’t lock you into a contract either.
The ADHD-ridden among you (from what I’ve learned, that should cover > 60% of people who frequent the site) can view a promo video of the device here:
http://maemo.nokia.com/
I’m personally tangled in NDA’s about this so I probably can’t talk much about it, but Linux lowers (and everyone that likes opennes) should dig this:
http://flors.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/screenshot13.png?w=500&h=3…
Edited 2009-08-27 18:51 UTC
Yeah, it is exactly what I’ve been waiting for — except the price. I’ll wait a while to see what happens with carrier contract subsidies & what not.
Useful video of the device in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP5R-5NX1BE
The animations are courtesy of Clutter. The device has proper 3d acceleration, so be prepared of being able to play various OpenGL games on it :-).
Edited 2009-08-27 20:51 UTC
does it support multitouch?
is there a way to have another input method besides touch and the built in keyboard (like an external keyboard via bluetooth or usb?)
Doesn’t support multitouch, but I heard it supports gesturing, eg. spiral motion to zoom. Since it’s a Linux device and has bluetooth, and many distros have support for Bluetooth HID, I would definitely imagine it supports input devices in some way, although how much tweaking you’d have to do to get it set up how you’d like (eg. how would a mouse work with this thing?) I don’t know.
thanks man..
would be cool to have a n900 attached to the tv and a wireless keyboard/mouse set to it
Ah what with the tv-out, wifi, bluetooth and unlocked Linux with X servers and VNC and whatnot I can only imagine the crazy things people will do with this thing!
Actually Nokia has said, that they are not going to use Android. So it not even “unlikely”. It isn’t actually surprising, since they are putting much effort into Maemo and Symbian.
Edited 2009-08-28 05:46 UTC
With the recent Python/QT announcement, do we know if Nokia is/will be pushing Python/QT development on phones? Or does that stuff already work?
It’s the Maemo people who initiated the PySide project, and they have already published a Maemo 5 version for it. PyQt for maemo has been around for a long time, see http://pyqt.garage.maemo.org.
PyGtk is *very* popular among Maemo developers, so PySide is the logical next step in this continuum.
Hmm what’s the SAR of this thing btw ?
The N900 seems an extremely nice phone, most of the operating system is free software and you get a lot of control with root access. It runs the same software as free software desktop operating systems, making it nice to use and develop for.
But, nokia said that it will be abandoning a large chunk of the code, going from Gtk to Qt in Maemo 6. Means that devs won’t be writing any programs for the current version and it will essentially become a dead platform.
Will there be any compatibility between this and the next version? Will nokia provide updates for the n900 to the next Qt-based versions? If not, I don’t know if this one is worth buying.
The N900 is still very much an Internet Tablet. It’s GSM radio is the for data access more than phone usage. I’ve explained this already, so here it is: http://ki6amd.tumblr.com/post/170762673/n900-what-you-must-know
OS News: Fix your idiotic headline!