A couple of very lengthy Nokia N900 articles from around the Interwebs for your Christmas Eve reading. Matt Miller, the 'USA's Nokia expert', has put up a nine page, detailed review of the N900 which makes for excellent reading. And Jay Montano has firmly gotten the 'constructive criticism' thing nailed down flat, with (at last count) 44 things which Nokia and the Maemo team need to fix or take on board.

It's been a rough year for the Symbian ecosystem, and an especially rough year for their partners. Samsung and Sony Ericsson have taken their portion of the punishment, but the lion's share belongs, for good or ill, to Nokia. The ecosystem strikes me as remarkably like another that last year was on the way down, but is now in good health.

Our very own Asri al-Baker has taken the time to sit down with Malcolm Lithgow, the guy behind Dreamspring, a software house which has been in the Psion and Symbian worlds for almost as long as I have(!) - Asri questions him on the challenges and rewards of developing for Symbian and asks him to summarise a modern developer's other options (Maemo, iPhone, Android, etc.) Here's the fairly lengthy, but interesting, interview.

Ewan Spence looks back with a practised eye on Ten Things that Nokia could have done with their Regent Street flagship store in order to have made it a success... Can you add to the list? What did the Apple store do right and Nokia do wrong? (and you're not allowed to say 'Sell iPhones'...)

Ewan Spence looks back with a practised eye on Ten Things that Nokia could have done with their Regent Street flagship store in order to have made it a success... 

Tomi Ahonen's writings are always worth a read, especially when they're short enough that you can spare to time to read them(! unlike many of his essays...) Here he makes the good point that mobile bandwidth is a finite resource and that we're fast approaching a tipping point where bandwidth may actually become more expensive and not less, due to to the increased airwave contention.

One million downloads a day. That's the popularity of the Ovi Store, reports ME News from a Nokia round-table this week. Although still in its first iteration, with a new version of the store due early in 2010, and many will comment that ring-tones and wallpapers as well as applications will be included in that number, it's a significant number.

Not Symbian, but hopefully of interest to any ex-Psion or ex-Nokia Communicator users, it seems the general form factor has been revived, with a new startup, PsiXpda, with photo below, offering a clamshell high spec, QWERTY-driven part-PDA, part-laptop. And, impressively, far from being vapourware, it's available next week. See below for links and details.

Live this morning are The Phones Show 96, embedded below but of only tangential interest here perhaps, featuring an extended news, an introduction to the Nokia N900, a user story taking in iPhone, Nokia N97 and HTC Hero, and AAS's kevwright giving his Top 10 iPhone apps. Also live is Phones Show Chat 15, the hour long weekly audio podcast, in which Tim Salmon and I talk about our Nokia N97-centric (seemingly) universe(!), about Podcasting, about the Nokia E72 and about implications from Nokia's Capital Markets Day.

One of the big selling points about the original Nokia N95, N86 and 5730 XpressMusic (among others) has been that they have hardware music controls. So, while pocketed, or while in another application, or even with eyes closed in bed at night, you can still skip music tracks, pause podcasts, and so on. But with the new breed of touchscreen phones, you're out of luck in this department. Or are you?