Last week I got a hands on with the Nokia N900 at CTIA San Diego.  I wasn’t totally floored with the device, but I really dug the Maemo OS.  For those of you who just can’t wait, good news, Dynamism has it up for preorder.  You can grab it for $629 and according to the retailer it will ship October 27th, or so they suspect.

Specs:

• TI OMAP 3430: ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz, PowerVR SGX with OpenGL ES 2.0 support
• Touch-sensitive widescreen display 3.5 inch, 800 x 480 pixel resolution
• GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz WCDMA 900/1700/2100 (HSPA)
• BL-5J 1320mAh battery
• 110.9 x 59.8 x 18 (19.55 at thickest part) mm
• 32GB of storage plus microSD card slot for expansion
• GPS

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Nokia announced their N900 touchscreen tablet, based on Linux-based Maemo software. The sleek, sexy looking N900 features:

• ARM Cortex-A8 processor
• Up to 1GB application memory
• OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration
• 32GB storage, expandable to 48GB via microSD
• WVGA resolution touch screen
• HSPA and WLAN wireless
• Physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard

The Nokia N900 will be available this October with a estimated retail price of 500EU.

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Back in May we saw rendered images of Nokia’s N900 (aka Rover, aka Maemo Flagship). Now, according to Mobile-review.com this is the handset in the flesh. As you can see it’s very similar to Mobile Crunch’s renders and it includes Nokia’s awkward (misaligned spacebar) QWERTY keyboard setup. OS wise were looking at Maemo, and praise the lord because any more Symbian and I think I’d have to choke myself out on my own vomit (yes, I hate Symbian that much). Of course, I haven’t tried my hand a Maemo, but its my assumption that any mobile OS (Windows excluded) is an improvement over the Nokia standard.

So will this be a game changer for Nokia? Perhaps, but I have my doubts. The N900’s form factor looks very similar to the N97, and despite it having a higher resolution screen (800×400) I’m still concerned that the it will lack serious multitouch abilities, such as the iPhone.  It looks very chunky for the pocket, which was one of my gripes with the N97 (review coming tomorrow). I took a look at some of the operating system’s screen shots, Maemo, and I’m very impressed with how clean and simple it looks.

[via Mobile Crunch]

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