So far my N900 seems to be a lot zippier with the latest firmware and I have heard reports that battery life should also be improved significantly so will keep an eye on this too. I just read a great tip from Mark over at The Nokia Blog where you can actually switch to portrait mode in the default web browser with a bit of finger gymnastics. Mark created a video to show how this works. You will need the latest firmware to enable this capability.

I didn’t watch the video at first and just read that you need to press Ctrl-Shift-O to enable portrait mode and after doing this over and over I saw now switch at all. I then watched the video and discovered you enter this three-finger press and then close the keyboard to see the browser in portrait mode. You can then open and close the keyboard to toggle back and forth. To turn off this functionality you can do the three-finger toggle again. To me, this is actually a very slick default to have since I always browse with the keyboard open in landscape anyways. Google Reader’s iPhone formatted page looks and works great in portrait mode and is something I use all the time. FYI, text input fields do NOT appear to work in portrait mode so this orientation is just a good way for single hand browsing where you can scroll with your thumb and is not for power surfing.

My good friend Lisa Gade, editor of Mobile Tech Review, writes some of the most comprehensive reviews online and I read all of her stuff before making my own purchase choices. She commonly uses T-Mobile like I do so I was very interested in reading her comparison of the Nokia N900 and Google Nexus One. I just bought both of these devices over the last two weeks and was going to write a comparison like this, but Lisa actually expressed my feelings almost exactly so I figured I would just direct you to her post.

The bottom line, as clearly stated by Lisa, is “… the Nexus One is more phone-centric while the Nokia N900 is more Web and media-focused.” I keep moving my SIM between both throughout each day and I do find the applications to be better on the Nexus One, particularly the social media clients like Twidroid and Foursquare. With the Ovi Store now rolling out on the N900, I am hopeful we will see more of these types of applications soon to take the application edge away from other new devices. Google Maps or updated Ovi Maps is also a major area that needs improvement on the N900 and it will make a fantastic navigation device once we get a solid mapping solution.

Have any readers tried both of these out and if so, do you agree with Lisa and me?

I was browsing my Twitter stream and saw that Mark posted a way to access the Ovi Store on the updated Nokia N900. The icon on the N900 still isn’t active to launch now takes you to the Ovi Store and you can also go to store.ovi.mobi in your N900 web browser to be taken to the Ovi Store with the N900 recognized as the device. It looks like the official, non-beta  Ovi Store application launch is getting closer and closer for the N900. You will see something like 10 games and 30 or so apps, along with themes and videos to download. I personally installed the Project Gutenberg ebook reader (found on a repository and NOT in the Ovi Store), Angry Birds, and Solitaire Touch. Check out the video below of the Project Gutenberg reader and Angry Birds game in action.

UPDATE: When you choose to download an application from the Ovi Store you are taken to the integrated Application Manager where all apps are installed. I must have gotten confused bouncing back and forth between the Ovi Store and Application Manager because an astute reader pointed out that the mGutenberg ereader application is in the repositories and NOT in the Ovi Store.

All applications currently in the N900 Ovi Store are free on the device, but I see you can purchase apps via the Ovi Store on the Internet so paid apps are rolling out as well. I thought the Angry Birds game was hilarious, but I also found that throwing the rabbits in Open Season (I said Great Outdoors in the video, oops.) was really funny so maybe I have a bit of twisted sense of humor. I like that the Project Gutenberg ebook program works in both landscape and portrait mode too so I can now get a ton of books on my N900 and it is getting more and more useful all the time.

Did you find any good apps in the Ovi Store for your N900?

I’ve been all smitten with my new Google Nexus One the last few days, but when the battery was dead this morning it gave me a chance to pop my SIM back into my Nokia N900. Nokia and Mozilla had a couple of surprises for me this morning when I saw that a new Maemo 5 update and Firefox Mobile RC 2 were available to download.

The firmware for the N900 is 1.2009.44-1.002 and is a 21.8 MB download. After selecting to perform the update you are prompted to create a backup. I skipped this step and went for it. Thankfully, all my apps and settings came through the update with flying colors and work just as well prior to the update. I have not been able to find any notes on what was updated and have not been able to find anything different on my device yet. There is still no MMS support or support for texting in portrait modes. I understand this is a minor update to prepare the device for a much more extensive update coming soon. Hopefully, this update does improve battery life a bit and make it a bit more stable.

Mozilla also released Firefox for Maemo Release Candidate 2 on Friday. If you are not prompted to update or do not yet have it loaded, then simply point your web browser to Firefox.com/m on your N900. As I said before the first release was unusable because it was so painfully slow and after some initial testing this does seem to be faster. I’ll try to take a video of it in action soon to share with you all.

If you browse through my Definitive Nokia N900 Guide you will see a post describing how to connect the Nokia N900 to your Mac computer. I had posted the steps needed to connect with a Nokia N900 running with a T-Mobile USA SIM and thought it was a good guide. Molly then told me that she couldn’t get her Mac working with the N900. After a bit of back and forth chat I finally figured out she had an AT&T SIM inside the N900. As a guy who has connected to various carriers over the year, I knew there were some different settings needed for AT&T.

As you can now see in my N900 to Apple Mac tethering post I posted the steps needed to connect through an AT&T SIM so you should be all set. Remember that you will only get EDGE data speeds, but it still may be helpful for those who do not want to have a T-Mobile account.

The third week of the Smartphone Round Robin was a tough one to work through since we had Christmas weekend followed by the New Year’s Day holiday. Thankfully, I was taking a look at Windows Mobile this week and I am intimately familiar with this platform and devices since I have been using them since 2001. I posted a couple of times over in the WMExperts forums and received some great feedback from readers there. Coincidentally, Phil from WMExperts was covering Nokia this week as he stated in his blog post soliciting your feedback.

I just woke up this morning and saw an email from my buddy Phil from WMExperts that was a great way to start of 2010. Last night Firefox Mobile RC 1 was made available as a free download for Nokia N900 owners. I quickly went and downloaded it and am working on a video of it to share with you as I test it out a bit.

According to the Mozilla site, here are the features of Firefox Mobile:

• The Real Deal Forget about the clunky, stripped-down mobile Web you’re used to. Firefox delivers the performance and security you expect, plus all the bells and whistles you know and love.
• Site for Sore Eyes Tabs and browser controls are stowed away to the sides of the screen. Now you can see what’s been hiding all this time – the entire Web page. Enjoy the view.
• Touch of Genius Bookmark your favorite sites with one touch. Swipe your finger across the screen to access tabs or install useful add-ons. Double tap to zoom. So smart it’s simple.
• Awesome Bar Forget about typing long URLs, let the Awesome Bar do the searching and get you the sites you love in an instant.
• Get Personal Add-ons have gone mobile. Personalize your browser and make it your own. Search and install add-ons on the go.
• Password Manager Typing passwords on your phone is just plain hard. Why do it more than once? Choose to “remember” site passwords and forget ever having to endure long and difficult typing.
• Fab Tabs Your tabs are close at hand. Just swipe your finger to the right to see thumbnails of all your open tabs to find what you want quickly.
• Be a Local… Wherever You Are Looking for the city’s best live music joint? An alternative route to the highway? Get insider info and access maps with Location-Aware Browsing.
• Get Up and Go Get Weave and surf the Web on your PC, get up and go, and have everything waiting for you on your phone: your history, open tabs, bookmarks, the Awesome Bar – just as you had left it.

I am particularly interested in Weave and syncing everything from my desktop to my N900. This can be very powerful and I sure hope this Release Candidate performs faster than the previous betas.

I tested out some websites for people early on in my N900 testing and commented that many of the flash heavy sites wouldn’t work due to the touchscreen on the N900. I was wrong about some and learned you can actually enable mouse/cursor mode in the browser and then use the stylus to move around the display like a desktop web browser. I just went and tried out a couple of games on Bubblebox.com and PopCap Games and they actually work pretty well on the N900.

To enable mouse/curser mode on the N900, slide your finger to the right from the bottom left corner of the display. A cursor icon will appear so tap on this and you will now be in mouse mode.

Check out the video below of me playing a couple of games (Zume and Bejeweled) on the PopCap Games site. Many of these PopCap games are available as downloadable games for the iPhone, S60 and other platforms and they are some of my favorite games. I can’t show my wife that they now work on the N900 or she will steal the N900 from me. Be careful using the games on this site though, they can be quite addictive

If you are reading this post, you are most likely a fan of Nokia devices and I wouldn’t be here writing this site if I too wasn’t a Nokia fan. That said, enthusiasts like us can also be the biggest critics of the companies were are passionate about because we want them to do better and know that they can. Rita over at Symbian Guru just posted an article on the top 5 Nokia blunders of 2009 that made for a good read and also spurred me to think about what the open, number 5 blunder could be.

Rita listed the following four as the top blunders of 2009:

• N97 release firmware
• N-Gage
• Ovi Share
• Nokia N86 8MP announcement

The 5th spot was left up to readers to provide in the comments so head on over and leave your opinion there. Looking back on 2009, I personally find the lack of North American presence and seemingly disregard for North America to be a candidate for the final spot. We did see the E71x and Surge come to AT&T, but Nokia let AT&T ruin the fabulous E71 device with their crapware and other limits that has actually made my Nokia E71x Starter Guide quite popular as people tried to clean up their devices. T-Mobile would have been a perfect carrier to launch the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic with since T-Mobile already carries some low end XpressMusic devices and Nokia could have promoted this one as a higher end music device that supported Amazon Video on Demand video content and still could have sold it quite cheap. We now see the N900 available and supported on T-Mobile’s blazing 3.5G HSPA+ network, but again there is no carrier involvement which greatly limits Nokia’s visibility in the US.

Hopefully, we see more carrier relationships and partnerships in 2010. I know we will see more awesome devices, but it sure would be great if more people here knew about them.

I think there were also successes in 2009 and I will soon be revealing a post about the achievements from Nokia in 2009.