Nokia N810 delivers the full web experience, Flash and all.
In recent months, I have been toying with Maemo, though it is Maemo 4 (code-named Diablo) on an old N810 and not version 5 (Fremantle) as on the N900.
The experience makes me wonder if Android and even iPhone would have had a chance if Nokia had bothered to put a Sim card slot in it and priced the tablet at a decent price rather than make it a Wi-Fi (and later WiMAX)-only tablet when the N770 was launched in 2005.
Maemo runs a variant of Debian Linux, but not in the way that Android is Linux. If we equate Linux to a person, then Debian (and Ubuntu) desktop Linux and Maemo are more like cousins, like different races sharing the same DNA structure. Debian and Android, however, are more like the 99.5 percent similarity between man and chimpanzee. Which one has the extra 0.05 percent of DNA is up to debate. To complete the analogy, iPhone and Windows Mobile would be aliens who have the same general bipedal build but are not related to us at all.
Maemo is a thinly skinned, stylus-friendly Linux. In this day and age of touch, it feels primitive. Indeed, many programs are skinned in a way that is superficial. Half the time you feel the program cries out for a mouse and cursor.
Maemo's software can be considered at the same time both rich and sparse. It is sparse as there are very few Maemo-native programs out there, Nokia's core applications not withstanding. Indeed, of the dozens of programmes I have installed on my N810, only the MediaBox (a streaming Media Player) and Midori (a webkit-based browser, Webkit being the engine that Apple's Safari is based on) seem comfortable with finger input in the tablet form factor. Others, like Claws Mail, cry out for a mouse, with icons too small and menus too fussy for fingertip or stylus navigation.
It is also interesting to note that MediaBox comes with three Thai TV stations pre-loaded. Channel 9, a music station, and ASTV News 1. Obviously someone in the Maemo development community wears a yellow shirt to work.The internal Nokia browser is based on an old version of Mozilla and does a decent job, only tripping up when rendering Thai fonts. Midori renders Thai correctly and is faster, too.
Now, the unexpected surprise is that the browser runs as if it were on a PC. This means a full PC experience for Facebook, albeit at a cramped 800x600. YouTube works as it does on a PC with a full version of Adobe Flash present. By and large, anything an older, slower PC can run and render, Maemo can run and render. Perhaps the only thing I missed after a few months of tinkering are the Google products. Google Docs does not work at all on either of the browsers and Gmail runs in limited, simple mode.
Whenever there is a phone review, everyone talks about how good or bad it handles Flash compared to a PC. This handles Flash as a PC does, full stop. Makes one wonder why the new iPad does not do Flash when a three-year-old Nokia tablet handles it perfectly.
Things soon get better. The internal Email client is nice and efficient but someone bothered to port Claws Mail and most of its plug-ins to Maemo. Granted, they did a bit of a cut and shut job with the UI, which is not as intuitive or stylus-friendly as it could be, but it is ever-so customisable and has plug-ins for GPG public-key encryption, all sorts of filtering and, well, anything you would expect of a Linux mail client.
Almost any program that runs on Linux can run on Maemo. It has a full Linux shell command line interface. All the standard Linux network tools are there too, making it perfect to debug a wireless network installation. If it had an RJ-45 wired Ethernet port, it would be perfect.
Going further, most Linux software can be run by recompiling it for the ARM architecture. Hackers (used in the original sense of the word; enthusiasts, not criminals) have already ported the entire Debian environment complete with GIMP (a Photoshop-like program) and Open Office 3 (yes, the entire suite). Do they run? Yes. Are they usable? No, as the CPU lacks the grunt and the lack of a mouse makes it more of a proof of concept. That said, adding a mouse (or external keyboard) is easy and one wonders how slick the Debian desktop will be given the extra power of the Cortex CPU in the N900.
Connectivity is a no-brainer, with seamless integration to connect to the Internet with last-generation Nokia phones, such as my N95, and even Windows Mobile phones. Oddly enough, getting it to work with the new N97 Mini was not a pleasant experience.
It also tries to mimic a phone with no less than three VoIP solutions included. One is Skype. It also has a SIP client built into the default presence "button" and Gizmo 5. The latter is especially interesting as it was purchased by Google three months ago and no longer accepts new users. What Google plans to do with a VoIP company now that it has both Google Voice and Google.com/phone is anyone's billion-dollar guess.
It has GPS and uses open-source maps. Compared to Nokia's Ovi maps, it is clumsy but it works quite well, even without being connected to the Internet.
As a phone OS or even a tablet OS, Maemo lacks the wow and slickness of Android or iPhone (and probably iPad). Like most things Nokia these days it lacks cohesion and a sense of direction. The keyboard is hard and the edges eat into your hands. But forget that for a while and look at it in the light of a full-fledged PC that can fit in your pocket. Perhaps it would be better to compare it to the pocketable PCs like the Fujitsu U-series or new slates like the Archos 9. In that light, it is a simple case of Linux vs Windows and this one comes with a good battery life to boot. Maemo does everything a Linux PC can do, buy it cries out for a keyboard and a mouse.
But judging from the way the N900 has been promoted, Nokia does not seem to be championing the Linux-ness of Maemo 5, instead trying to make it a high-end phone OS. It is like a beauty queen with a PhD in English literature reduced to a Q&A on her favourite colours. Yes, Maemo is a finger-friendly phone OS, but it is so much more. What other phone OS has a full-fledged competitor to Microsoft Office rather than a dumbed-down document viewer?
Nokia has announced a roadmap where it will release a few more Maemo 5 devices this year. It will be fun to see how well they fared in a year's time.
from ://http://http://bit.ly/cutV1v
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