I was lucky enough to awake and find a very interesting tweet on Twitter which was asking for those in London interested in attending a video shoot for the Nokia (rover) N900. If you didn't see that tweet then you obviously were not following
@WeAreMaemo. As it happened I replied and got myself confirmed to attend the shoot as it was a first come first serve basis.
In a West London studio somewhere I turned up to find myself watching a few people going through their scenes whilst the producer and I had a chat about what was going on, my role and waiting for Philip Hickey from Nokia Marketing to turn up. As I can't reveal any details of the shoot specifically (I'm not under any embargo, I just agreed verbally not to reveal it, I'm a man of my words) you'll have to wait until it's ready for public release, I'm sure I'll get some sort of exclusive first hands basis access to it, so stay tuned here for the final product.
Once Phil turned up (he's one bug dude! He played Basketball for the London Towers) we sat down and had a chat about the strategy for the shoot, Maemo and the Nokia N900. I finally got my hands on the
Nokia N900, although this was a prototype N00 version. First things first, let's fire up the baby!
Upon turning it on and getting used the to the touch sensitivity, orientation and set-up (it didn't take too long) I was on Twitter tweeting about it!
Camera
Physically the device was pretty solid, similar quality build to the N800/N810 but much much smaller than them. Pictures don't do it justice really. It's as wide as an iPhone, shorter than a Nokia N97 and slightly chubby in depth. It will easily fit into most pockets. As with all devices the camera had to be tested, which I did by taking a few sample pictures below.
The Macro mode was used in the fruit shot, which was set at 3.2 MegaPixel (wide-screen) mode by default, which I found later in the settings to take a picture of the set. Take note the set was pretty dark and I used no flash. Manually I set the camera to ISO400 and Landscape mode. The result isn't too bad in my opinion. The clear thing lacking is the saturation in colour from the Macro Fruits picture, this was also the same result on my N95 too - a common Nokia handset fault it seems.
Keyboard And UI
I'm a big fan of physical keyboards and was eager testing this one out. It took me a little while to get used to the space bar being so far to the. The other irk was the keys were bigger than on the N97 but less spaced out, and more like the E71, which once got used to I has out typing pretty comfortably without issues.
Whilst the UI was clearly worked on to make it easier to navigate and use, I had to get used to the "Android" style swipe which includes 4 screens - one more than Android, and all which can be customised when theming for the device - this will be interesting for those themers interested to design for this theme (I'm looking at you @jefdizon and @mobile9dotcom members). Once I had set-up my my various short-cuts and screens, it was very easy to get used to the windows switcher and app switcher / menu in the top left hand corner. This makes it very easy to switch between various tasks, a major talking point of the device is multi-tasking, and this will play a key role in this.
Browser
The other big talking point is the Mozilla browser and support of Flash. One thing I can say is, I was pretty quickly impressed with the kinetic scrolling, flash playback and overall performance of the browser. The swirly zooming took z few attempts to get used to mind (you can also use double tap to zoom).
Conclusion
Obviously this was a very quick play and hands on impression, but I was left impressed with the device overall. This was also a prototype so I'd expect the final release version (which I'll hopefully get my hands on nearer release - I've been told 14th October) to have bugs ironed out and be more responsive and smoother to play with.
If my opinion doesn't count for much, just ask the cast on their impressions, they were very impressed and actually had to be dragged back to set to continue filming! They were impressed with the quality and size of the screen, which was playing the 9 trailer by Tim Burton, which Nokia have some sort of promotional rights to I was told.
