The Nokia N900 internet tablet: price, specs, release date and review

The official announcement of the Nokia N900 internet tablet hasn’t happened yet, but that hasn’t stopped a slew of pictures and a review of the device from surfacing courtesy of Mobile Review. The review speaks highly of the N900 and even compares it to the holy grail of mobile tablets, the iPhone.

According to the hands-on review, the Nokia N900 has a slide out QWERTY keyboard for input and an 800 x 480 pixel touch screen. It has a 5-megapixel camera with F2.8 lens, 32GB of onboard memory with a microSD card slot for up to 32GB more, a micro-USB port, GPS and TV-out. It also runs on the Maemo 5 software which is a huge step up from the previous models.

Get the review and a link to tons of pictures (and I’m not kidding in the least — metric tons of photos) of the tablet and software screenshots by clicking more.

Get to know the Nokia N900 intimately.

I would say what’s going to follow are my personal impressions of the device plus opinions of my family and several people who also had a chance to play around with the N900. Compared to S60, the N900′s boot time is much faster, and also take into account the fact that we played around only with its prototype, so we were prepared for occasional reboots during our quality time with it. This is something Nokia will have to work on, and I hope they’ll fix this issue in the final version of the device. Other than that, I was more than happy with how the N900 performed.

Due to variety of visual effects, smooth transitions and decent reaction time of the touch screen (which is a significant improvement over the Nokia N97), the N900 feels more like the Apple iPhone. At the same time its UI looks nothing like that of the iPhone – it’s just different, but eye-candy nonetheless (maybe somewhat similar to HTC’s products). Everyone who had a chance to play with it noted that it didn’t look like any other Nokia-branded device, yet it was an enjoyable experience overall.

Even the browser is pretty stable, and it supports flash, video and applets. On top of that there is partial compatibility with older applications, some things work and some don’t. But in general most apps did start up on the N900, yet some of them required libraries our device didn’t have.

Those who are familiar with Diablo (Maemo 4.2) will feel right at home with the N900: same on-screen keyboards (despite the phone having a hardware one) and it’s considerably easier to switch input languages than in S60-powered devices. All in all, not much has changed, it even sports the same memory setup. The phone’s 800×480 pixel resistive screen (pretty responsive, by the way) is great for watching videos and the kickstand mounted on the N900 only helps the experience. Perhaps they’ll decide to throw in an extra stylus into the box (since the N900 already comes with one built into its casing), much like the one that came with the Nokia N97.

I’m frequently asked the question whether it’s possible to list through the interface in Fremantle? Honestly, though, I don’t quite get it, but all pages containing a significant number of items (more than one screen can accommodate) can be listed through. Copy/pasting text fragments is allowed in all menus.

The phone’s GPS department seemed well-tuned too – its cold start time didn’t exceed a couple of minutes and the accuracy was comparable to the Nokia N97. The N900 also comes will all utilities for tapping into Twitter and Facebook right out of the box. Its media player can deal with non-converted videos (although we did run it with additional codecs, which aren’t guaranteed to make it to the final version of the device). I hope over a hundred of the UI screenshots will give you a decent impression of what the N900 is and how it differs from S60. More airy I’d say.

And the last thing I almost forgot to mention – all context menus are made in the form of pop-ups which are easy to dismiss. All you need to do is press on any area of the screen outside the menu and it’ll be closed in an instant. Also I like how the task manager is implemented. On top of that, you can setup the home screen however you like using various themes and widgets.

I thought it wouldn’t make much sense to go through all features of the phone just yet – I’m not lazy, I just have to leave some bread for Nokia’s announcement guys! So, come back after the official release for more – we’ll talk more about all feats and tricks the N900 has got under its hood. But what I can say for now is that it’s the true mobile powerhouse in every sense of this word, that comes wrapped in a very eye-candy and functional UI at that. It won’t become a hit, but at the same time the N900 is a milestone both for Nokia and the industry that won’t just go unnoticed. The phone is supposed to hit the shelves late in 2009 and will go for 550 Euro (the price, however is subject to change).