Three of my geekest friends are really hyped about the N900, so I decided to look a little into it. To be honest, I went to google and looked for “N900 iPhone comparison”, and I landed here.
I was not impressed actually, my friends made it sound way better. It does have some features the iPhone 3GS lacks (flash, decent camera, better screen resolution), but the iPhone 3GS is an iPhone 3G with a compass and more memory, and the iPhone 3G is already more than one year old.
So, in short, I don’t think the N900 is really worth it, and here’s why:
It got late to the party
While it does add some new features, it’s being released later, and the iPhone has already a HUGE advantage, meaning more accesories, more apps, etc., also, being released later means that it doesn’t get as much attention as it doesn’t innovate as much.
The touchscreen
It’s (almost) the same size of the iPhone, and the resolution is more than twice the iPhone’s (that’s cool), but the lack of multitouch is what bothers me. It’s not because there are a lot of things to do with multitouch, but because the way a non-multitouch screen behaves when it detects multiple touches is quite ugly (from my experience with Palm). And the multitouch is good for innovative games, apps and features.
Also, if I know Nokia, they’ll try to fit as much as they can in the screen, which is not the point on a limited screen. Apple did a great job on the iPhone’s UI.
Design
It’s nice to have a physical keyboard (although the iPhone’s auto-correction makes me not need it), but that means having a mechanism that can get stuck, and makes the device not as sleek, which leads me to my next point, and this might sound really fanboish: it’s not Apple.
Apple’s devices are usually really sleek, look at the iPhone, it has as little buttons and connectors as possible. Nokia won’t bother about that, and will add slots, conectors, a keyboard, and a lot of things that will make the phone not look as good as it could.
Frameworks
As a programmer and now a developer (I enrolled for Apple’s program today!), I can’t leave this out. Apple provides a really complete set of frameworks (although sometimes I feel it’s too easy to put an app on the store, which leads to a bunch of crap too) that allow developers to exploit the device a lot, and the UI frameworks help to keep a consistency on the UI, plus they come really well documented, let’s see how they handle that with the N900.
What I DO like
I do like that it runs Linux, as I like and use Linux a lot. Also, having root access is cool too (not like we can’t have that on the iPhone, right? Though it does lead to a lot of stupid users to break their phones and complain a lot), and not having to pay for distribute apps is a great plus too.
The camera, flash, Flash and a full featured browser are good too, but a) I don’t use my phone as a camera that much, b) I do prefer having a mobile browser on the iPhone as some pages are formatted nicely (check this site with a mobile phone!), so they don’t mean a lot to me.
Nonetheless, I’m glad Nokia is stepping up with a decent device, because it means Apple will have to cut the crap and start improving the iPhone with what we want and need.
Future awesome computer scientist, ex-hardcore gamer (regular gamer now), sniper, gadget lover, iPhone Dev.
This review seems awfully biased towards the “Nothing is better than the Iphone” side of the fence.
Firstly the multitouch of the iphone is a nice feature. But you forgot to mention that although this is present, the iphone has a capacitive screen, adn so can only be used with yoru fingers, the N900 has a resistive screen, adn so you can use your fingers, a pen, anything you like (might be nice to use outdoors with a pen instead of cold fingers
.
Secondly, your right about the iphone looking really nice nad sleek, and not having extra ports and buttons, this does however mean that there is absolutelly no way to upgrade the memory of the phone. What yo uahve is what you got, FOREVER, there is no way you can just buy an SD card, and stick it in and get more memory.
The main advantage of the N900 is the openess of the device, its fully open sources, meaning that many applications can be ported to it, pretty much all of the current maemo apps uim sure will be available almost instantly. Also you are able to do anything you like, without voiding your warrantly by not using an OOFICIAL STORE, why cant you do what you want with your device? Apple seem to think you cant. With the N90-0 you can stick in an SD card with music and movies and watch away
The hardware keyboard is also a plus in some respects, you can type wiothout messing with screen realestate.
The main main feature of the N900 is truew multitasking, the IPhone doesnt do this, when you move from one app to another, you have to load the first one again if you wanna go back to it. The N900 klets you do lots of things at teh same time.
I agree my review is biased, and you do make some interesting points.
Being able to use a pen is nice, although the iPhone’s UI is thought so you don’t need to. In that case it depends on what you want, pens had their time with Palm, but for me they feel old.
Anyway, being open source doesn’t mean apps can be ported (apps can be ported as long as you have the source code, the device doesn’t have to be open source), I think you got that wrong. It means that you can access the source of the OS (in theory). Which is actually quite cool (It’d be great to have the iPhone’s source to make better mods, but that’s not happening).
And multitasking, the iPhone CAN do it. There are apps for jailbroken iPhones that can background apps, and though the 3G doesn’t have enough memory to background more than two apps, I’ve heard the 3G[s] can handle up to 7 apps in the background.
Another great feature the iPhone has that kinda reduces the need to background, is Push, which works great.
Thanks for your comment though!