Thursday, January 7, 2010

Nokia N900 - A Handheld... Device

Its a new year and thusly it was time for a new phone. Towards the end of December I ordered my Nokia N900, it arrived just last week and I have been enjoying it ever since! The N900 is much more than just a phone however and I have been playing with my new toy a lot (thusly why the blog has been rather quite lately). The N900 really is a device of the future, it now functions as all of the following for me:

Web Browser: The N900 has the best mobile browser I've ever used (its built on firefox technology). Not only does it support full flash (9.4) but it renders page beautifully on the 800x480 resolution screen.

Camera: The little bugger packs a 5.8 mega pixel camera with an awesome flash. It takes both high resolution photos as well as decent quality video.

Music Player: The N900 has 32gigs of internal flash memory along with a slot for a mircoSD card that will take up to additional gigs - it holds a lot of media. In addition to this because of the full flash support I often stream internet radio on my N900 - as if this was not enough the little computer also packs a FM radio receiver/transmitter.

Flash Light: Just like a few other smart phones the N900 has an application that gives you a white screen to use as a white light. In addition if this is not enough to see by it also has an option to toggle the camera flash on as a light (its super bright!)

Video Player: Little bugger also does video out via a set of included RCA cables. The media player supports a wide slew of codecs as well, I watch movies off the little guy.

Gaming: Been rocking my Poke'mon lately. N900 has a GB, GBA, and a few other emulators for playing your favorite old school games on. In addition to this the N900 has full 3D support (and bounce evolution is super addicting...)

Phone: At the end of the day I sometimes forget my new toy also makes and takes phone calls. (And sends piles of text messages)

Calculator: My favorite CAS works wonderfully on my N900 fully - it makes a great little calculator.

Terminal: God I love cracking out commands in terminal. Lastly, I've been using apt-get to install applications on my tiny computer and sshing into my remote server.

All in all I am quite enjoying my latest toy and new software packages are being developed for it every day that only expand its usability further (there are currently packages in testing that turn it into a Wii-Mote and/or a PS3 controller). Heres to hoping 2010 brings many fun new toys!

~Jeff Hoogland

4 comments:

  1. I've heard that you can also use the N900 as a VNC client -- allowing you to open a GUI session to a remote PC. Have you tried that? That would be a cool feature for a smartphone...

    One question I have (as someone who regularly builds & rebuilds Ubuntu on various machines): What if you screw up the FS while repartitioning or downloading/changing elements of the OS? How hard is it to restore the default configuration?

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  2. VNC does work quite well on the N900 (I use it often). And I can speak from personal experience that restoring the default partition setup on the phone is as easy as re-flashing the device. I've had to do that once or twice now ;)

    Nokia even makes a .deb installer for their flasher software :)

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  3. Hello ! Mind to share where did you get the Maxima wxMaxima packages for the N900? :D thanks !

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  4. I know it has been awhile Fernando - but I just posted a HOWTO for getting wxMaxima running on the N900 - http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/09/howto-wxmaxima-on-nokia-n900.html

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