Smart phones have become smarter than people, of late. The dumber people get the smarter the phone needs to be. The SciFi dream cum nightmare of Machines ruling human race is well in sight. If you have doubts ask your smart phone.
Just like a movie hero the iPhone made a dramatic entrance into the Gadgets market. And like in movies many people wanted to kill the hero. And every company sent out what is sweetly named as ?iPhone killer?. And Nokia has sent their own mercenary the Nokia N900.
I recently switched from a first generation iPhone to the N900. It was an easy decision to quit iPhone. But a tough one between N900 and Nexus One or even some other Nokia Sony Ericsson phones.
N900 is positioned as a Tablet PC with a phone. (If not it should be.) Because it is more a Linux running net PC than a phone. It even takes a few clicks to get to the Phone Application. And yes it is one of the Applications run by this cute little instrument.
N900 performs wonderfully. It multi-tasks better than my low end Compaq Laptop. I could have the Internet radio running while I was browsing or playing a game. The VOIP function is extended to chat services like Gtalk. Though the call quality on these were sub par. N900 has a 5MP camera and the photos looked awesome. This was something I was looking for in my new phone.
There are some cute applications available. And I just downloaded Firefox mobile and it looks promising with the usual Add-Ons.
Firmware update is very simple and can be done directly from phone. In fact the PC sync app that Nokia has sucks big time and seems to be incompatible with the N900. It has a file manager that is a very useful and gives you ways of keeping the inbuilt 32GB memory occupied. It even allows you to download stuff from internet on to the internal memory.
N900 is not without its share of downers. The user interface is not as intuitive as iPhone. Apple set very high standards with their super intuitive user interface which included the .com key, next key while filling internet forms (this is available in Firefox mobile), portrait mode applications etc. And the learning curve for an iphone user was much shorter. N900 has very few apps that run on portrait mode.
Getting N900 to work for you fully may require at least basic PC skills. Linux skills would help even better. While the out of the box apps and utilities are simpler to use there are times when you might have to get to the terminal and run some Linux Commands. I will soon be exploring this since N900 does not have Unicode font support but they allow me to install it.
I was disappointed initially when the N900 kept restarting for no reason. A firmware update fixed it.
I love the phone for what it is capable of. It does require some level of Geekiness. All I was looking for a phone that has a tiny little keyboard, a great camera and the ability to get my mails, social networking, and a bit of internet browsing. (Yes. That?s all ). N900 is much more than this. People have installed windows OS on it.
So I have no shame in admitting, like in TV Game show, I am Cyril Alex and I am not smarter than my smartphone.