Look & Feel

Other than the phone itself, the package also contains a microUSB charger, which became almost standard for most manufacturers, a microUSB cable, also doubling as a battery charger, an adapter for both sorts of legacy Nokia chargers, a cable to connect the phone to a TV and the mandatory pair of headphones. All of this comprises a nicely formed bundle of equipment, but without much innovation, something which we’d expect to follow a high-end phone such as the N900.

Not many phones can be deemed flawless or without a single major drawback. Achilles’ heel of the N900 is its size. Dimensions of 110.9 x 59.8 x 18 mm, with a weight of 181 g, could have passed for a business class phone earlier perhaps, but the N71 changed that forever, being a serious business phone and a phone of humble dimensions at the same time. On the other hand, the manufacturing quality is top notch. Perhaps the only potential flaw is the complete lack of metal parts. The plastic is of highest quality, with no screeching or coupling gaps whatsoever and no signs of them appearing in the future at all, but it’s still – plastic. The left side contains power, camera and sound control buttons, the only buttons present on the device aside from the slide key used to unlock the phone. The camera has an active shutter, which ensures endurance and a scratch-free lens. The microUSB connector is located on the top, and the 3.5 mm headphone connector on the bottom. We found it interesting that the phone also has an IR port, although its functionality is rather different from the way it used to be, which is only logical, because Bluetooth now took over much of IR port’s original spectrum of uses.

One of the major features of the phone is a 3.5” WVGA scratch-resistant display with a resolution of 800x480 and support for up to 16 million colours. Image quality is of highest quality, with an excellent contrast and an even better sun glare visibility.

The hardware which runs all this consists primarily of an ARM Cortex A8 processor running at 600 MHz, backed up by the PowerVR SGX GPU, 256 MB of RAM, 32 GB of internal memory and SD card slot with support for cards with the capacity of up to 16 GB, should space ever be lacking. 3G, Wi-Fi, DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 and TV-out support should also be noted, and the list of supported audio/video formats is impressive and you can see it in an enclosed chart.

The slide keyboard is a tad harder to pull out in order to better fix the phone in its open/close positions. The same reason is behind the fact that the keyboard is quite short when pulled out compared to other slide phones, which, again, led to the entire QWERTY keyboard being fit into only three rows. This is the only real flaw of the keyboard which is otherwise one of the best we’ve encountered so far. Pressure response was almost perfect, which is likely to make up for the imminent slowdown caused by the narrow space between keys.

Although nicely tucked in behind the shutter, which prevents any scratches, the 5 Mpix camera left us longing for more, especially since the competition has largely switched to 12 Mpix for the best models. At least the flash is of decent strength compared to the average built-in flash of today, if we disregard the phones with xenon flashes, which are admittedly very rare.

Besides all possible types of connections, GPS and FM receiver are there as well, making a welcome, although expected, inclusion, and especially worth noting is the FM transmitter, an increasingly popular feature which Nokia has recently started including. A decision we can only salute.