Nokia N900 – can it handle the competition? (1)

According to Nokia, N900 is a 'game changer," an internet tablet "with a phone built-in" that promises to change the way we communicate.

No wonder, the huge number of pre-orders have forced Nokia to delay the official launch date of N900 till December 4.

But the billion dollar question is - can N900 take competition head-on?

Nokia believes it can.

N900, which promises to be a "game changer," runs on Maemo platform that promises to perform "PC like" multitasking (in other words, Maemo is has enough oomph to have dozens of application windows open while taking calls, driving the touchscreen and taking input from the Qwerty keyboard at the same time) besides providing some compelling "desktop" (mobile-top?) personalization features. In other words, you can upload and use personal photos and images as desktop backgrounds, create intelligent contact shortcuts, add, edit and delete widgets, and display shortcuts to your favourite applications and websites.

N900 also boasts of a Mozilla-based browser that can run Firefox 3.0 add-ons and can handle any webpage with ease, including the extremely Flash-heavy Webkinz and Hulu. In fact, it is almost a full fledged, touch optimised Firefox browser with complete HTML, Flash, Javascript and other web standard support. In other words, websites on N900 look the same (if only with a smaller symbols and elements) as they would look on a desktop PC with 800-pixel wide resolution display.

Other features of N900 include TI OMAP 3430:ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor; PowerVR SGX graphics card with OpenGL ES 2.0 support; a 3.5-inch WVGA resistive touchscreen display with 800x480 resolution; a world-class 5-megapixel camera (with Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar lens, 3x digital zoom, autofocus, dual LED flash and multiple capture modes); WVGA video recording (at 848x480 pixels @25fps); Adobe Flash 9.4 support; media player with support for multiple audio and video playback formats; GPS with A-GPS support; Ovi Maps; geo-tagging; Bluetooth 2.1; TV-out; 3.5mm headphone jack; microUSB connector, a nifty kickstand at the back and infrared port.

The N900 is also road-ready for mobile internet use thanks to 3G, GPRS, EDGE and WiFi support.

The smartphone is also an excellent messaging device, featuring a slide-out full landscape-oriented Qwerty tactile keyboard, a full Qwerty onscreen keyboard and support for Mail for Exchange, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.