My friend Jay at MyNokiaBlog had an awesome chance to chat with Jussi Makinen and the Maemo community recently, and captured the talk on video. The Q&A centered quite a bit around the hardware choices on the Nokia N900, including why it has a resistive display instead of capacitive, as well as the dual-LED question that many of you would like to ask yourselves.

Jay also went through the trouble of transcribing the video, so you can click here to read through the text version, if you don’t feel like sitting through the video.

Nokia N900 Q&A with Jussi Mäkinen and Maemo Community from MyNokiaBlog on Vimeo.

Related Posts

• Tablet-Suite Group Looking For Requests
• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
• Only So Excited About the N900
• Irreco Turns The N900 Into A Remote Control
• Nokia World 2009 Videos: Ewan MacLeod Of Mobile Industry Review

In addition to the various hands-on and demonstration videos that we recorded at Nokia World 2009, I was able to sit down with my friend Ewan MacLeod of MobileIndustryReview to chat about various things, including the Nokia N900, and what it means to the mobile industry as a whole. Given that he speaks with developers for various mobile platforms on a regular basis, Ewan is rightly interested in the developer’s edge of the N900 and Maemo.

What do you think? Does the N900 present a valuable opportunity to developers? More importantly, how do you think Nokia will address the problem of generating revenue for Maemo developers? The operating system is based on an open-source system, which typically does not support for-pay applications, for the most part.

Related Posts

• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• Video Interview With Dr. Ari Jaaksi
• Pre-Order Your Nokia N900 Now
• Off To Nokia World 2009
• Tablet-Suite Group Looking For Requests

With the Nokia N900 expected to be available in October, things are going to get really exciting, really quickly. Case in point, Amazon has already posted its pre-order page for the Nokia N900, with the pricing at $649.99, just in line with what Nokia announced at Nokia World 2009. You can get 2-day shipping, as well.

If you’re not familiar, a pre-order is where you give your financial details (credit card, authorization, etc) to the retailer, who holds onto it until they have stock of the item. The transaction is then processed as soon as the retailer has the inventory in their warehouse. This way, you get the product as *soon* as possible. Often, they’ll also include something extra, such as a Bluetooth headset or something.

If you’re interested, but don’t want to hand over your payment details so quickly, you can also call up either of the Nokia Flagship Stores in the United States (Chicago or New York) and give them your name and phone number. They’ll put you on the waiting list, and will give you a call before they release their inventory to the public.

Are you going to pre-order the Nokia N900, or are you going to wait a few weeks/months, till the price drops a little bit?

Related Posts

• Nokia N900 Pre-Order Drops To $582 On Amazon
• Nokia World 2009 Videos: Ewan MacLeod Of Mobile Industry Review
• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• Video Interview With Dr. Ari Jaaksi
• Tablet-Suite Group Looking For Requests

Nokia has launched an interesting new contest this week at the onedotzero festival in London. The PUSH N900 project is hosted by Nokia, and invites anyone to tell how you would hack or mod the Nokia N900, powered by Maemo, to connect to something that you love. The project is open to anyone, and has some awesome prizes, too.

A panel of experts will judge the entries on October 25 and will select the winning entries. Each winner (or winning group) will receive N900 devices to test and implement their hack/mod on, as well as funding and support from Nokia. The finished hacks/mods will then be shared with the rest of the world through setups in the Nokia Flagship Stores around the world.

You can check out the PUSH N900 blog here, or go ahead and submit your entry here.

Related Posts

• Tablet-Suite Group Looking For Requests
• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
• Only So Excited About the N900
• Irreco Turns The N900 Into A Remote Control
• Jussi Makinen Chats With The Maemo Community

Urho Konttori has updated his awesome Theme Maker application to support the Nokia N900 (and theoretically, other Maemo 5 devices, should some others get announced). The Theme Maker application not only allows you to package a custom background and change the toolbars and buttons used throughout the operating system, but you can also apply changes to the various icons, fonts, and widgets, as well. This is definitely an in-depth theming tool, and I’m really pumped to see this thing updated to support the newest Maemo-powered handset.

Here’s a sample of the icons you can theme (these are not the official N900 ones, but rather the Oxygen ones, used simple as a placeholder).

If you’re down for some theming, you can get the latest package files from the Maemo.org Garage, and get to work. There currently doesn’t seem to be a place on Talk.Maemo.org to showcase your custom themes (though you should definitely submit them to the Garage). If you create some custom themes, let us know, we’d be glad to test them out (once we get ahold of an N900) and do a quick write up here at Maemo-Guru.com.

I personally am hoping, of course, for a camo theme, so if any themers need an idea, there you go. Free of charge.  I’m also hoping that some of the awesome themers from the Symbian ecosystem find the time to branch out and create some awesome Maemo themes.

Related Posts

• Tablet-Suite Group Looking For Requests
• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
• Nokia N900 Pre-Order Drops To $582 On Amazon
• How Would You Use The N900 In Portrait Mode?
• Video Demo Of Bounce On N900 Over TV-Out

One of the more disappointing discoveries about the Nokia N900 and Maemo 5 from Nokia World’s extensive hands-on videos was the realization that the device does not actually fully support portrait mode, aside from the phone application. Clearly there are some awesome use cases for using a Maemo-powered device in portrait mode, but for whatever reason, Nokia did not see fit to enable this in the planned final production firmware for the Nokia N900.

Not to worry, since Maemo is largely driven and managed by the community, with Nokia involved, you can easily chime in with your reasons as to what parts of the Maemo operating system should work in portrait mode, and why. This thread, over at Talk.Maemo.org, begins with a request for interested Maemo community members to list out some of the applications in Maemo that you would like to see working in portrait mode. Obviously the browser is a no-brainer, but there are also other suggestions that I didn’t think of, as well.

You can chime in, as well. What areas of Maemo would you expect to be able to use in portrait mode? Personally, I think the entire UI should be able to fluidly change from landscape to portrait, based on the accelerometer. It would be easier to implement and for consumers to understand than having individual applications support it, and would leave the choice with the user. What do you think?

Related Posts

• Video Demo Of Bounce On N900 Over TV-Out
• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
• Nokia Will Cater To Carrier Branding On The Nokia N900
• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• Only So Excited About the N900

Nokia used to be known for its Snake game, pre-installed on every device it sold. With the resurgence of Nokia’s new N-Gage gaming platform, they turned Snake into a for-pay title, unfortunately, and have since been experimenting with other titles being pre-installed. Two of the titles being installed on Nokia’s touch devices currently are Global Race and Bounce.

Global Race is obviously a racing game, and it uses the device’s built-in accelerometer for turning and whatnot. The graphics are quite nice, but the gameplay gets really old, really quickly, unfortunately. Bounce is a less sophisticated looking game, instead featuring a bouncy red ball as the main player. The object of the game is to use the phone’s built-in accelerometer to guide the ball through the various levels, avoiding enemies and pitfalls along the way.

To be honest, the game looks rather lame and cartoonish on the existing Symbian-powered touchscreen phones like the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. However, as you can see in the video below, the Nokia N900 has included some major enhancements to the graphics capabilities, and even over the TV-Out, this Bounce game looks fantastic! We can only hope this is a first baby step in an emerging gaming community for the Maemo platform.You can already play Doom on the existing Internet Tablets, which are a far cry from the capabilities shown off on the N900.

What do you think? Could Maemo eventually overtake the iPhone’s gaming community with such great graphics?

Related Posts

• How Would You Use The N900 In Portrait Mode?
• Nokia Will Cater To Carrier Branding On The Nokia N900
• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• Only So Excited About the N900
• Nokia N900 Pre-Order Drops To $582 On Amazon

After quite a bit of misunderstanding, it seems that Nokia initially implied that it would not allow carriers to customize the Nokia N900. If you’ve ever bought a Symbian phone from a carrier such as AT&T, you’re aware of the massive amount of crapware that they insist Nokia puts in there. The carriers are also well known for having random features removed, such as the FM radio from the E71x (present in the unbranded variant, the E71) and locking down the network selection, so that you cannot force the phone to use EDGE or 3G only, if you wanted.

While it sounded like a major win, and a great indication of Nokia showing some backbone to the carriers, apparently it was untrue. Other major smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone, Palm Pre, and HTC’s Android-powered phones only feature a small amount of internal carrier branding, but it seems that Nokia has backed off of disallowing carriers access to Maemo’s guts.

In a post on Nokia Conversations this morning, Nokia clarifies:

This week, there have been a number of speculative stories suggesting that Nokia will not allow for operator customization of Maemo devices. Seems a few people are getting ahead of themselves. As we have said over the past couple of weeks, our plan with Maemo is to focus on the consumer experience – integrating applications and services from Nokia, our broad community of developers and publishers and, of course, from our operator customers. While we have not announced immediate plans to offer an operator variant for the N900, there are many customization points for operators on the N900. It would be absolutely incorrect to assume that we will not offer operators the ability to tailor future Maemo devices to suit their needs.

Of course, it is fantastic to see the positive buzz building around Maemo and the Nokia N900, so we wanted to clear up these few important details that appear to have been misunderstood.

Sad to see, but it makes sense, given that Nokia definitely wants carriers to offer its new Maemo-powered flagship.

Related Posts

• How Would You Use The N900 In Portrait Mode?
• Video Demo Of Bounce On N900 Over TV-Out
• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Pre-Order Drops To $582 On Amazon
• Irreco Turns The N900 Into A Remote Control

In addition to the other video footage that we’ve shared from Nokia World 2009 of the Nokia N900, we were able to capture some raw footage of users simply playing around on the device. While not as immediately informative as our previous videos, I think this sort of video is definitely useful, as it shows off the general flow of things, as seen by a user without a helping hand from the demonstrator.

As you can see, there are still some areas in which the new Maemo 5 UI needs some improvement for the normal user, but there are also some hidden gems in this particular video. Pay close attention to the app catalog to see some sweet surprises!

Related Posts

• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Vs N810 Comparison Photos
• Off To Nokia World 2009
• Nokia World 2009 Videos: Ewan MacLeod Of Mobile Industry Review
• Pre-Order Your Nokia N900 Now

While at Nokia World 2009 last week, I was able to get one of the folks on the Experience Lounge floor to give a guided tour of the new Nokia N900, which is powered by Nokia’s Maemo 5 operating system. In the demo, you can get a great feel for the smoothness of the device, as well as some of the additional features that have not been mentioned in other videos.

Related Posts

• Nokia World 2009 Videos: Ewan MacLeod Of Mobile Industry Review
• Video Interview With Dr. Ari Jaaksi
• Off To Nokia World 2009
• Pre-Order Your Nokia N900 Now
• How Would You Use The N900 In Portrait Mode?