I had a great time at yesterday's N900 meetup in San Francisco. It was organized by N Series US' Matt Bennet and TnkGrl Mobile's TnkGrl and sponsored by Nokia who graciously picked up the bar tab and provided a couple of N900's to play with. Matt posted some photos of the meet up and Tnkgrl's video coverage is on her blog.
The N900 is a fantastic device that really feels more like a computer than a phone. Mathew and Tnkgrl have each had loaner N900s for a couple of weeks and both were very enthusiastic about the device, especially the OS and software. One of them said it was far more stable than any S60 phone they had ever used. And this is with pre-release firmware.
Focusing on WapReview's subject area, I spent most of my time with the N900 using the browser. It's the latest version of MicroB, Nokia's in-house Mozilla Gecko based browser for Maemo devices. MicroB's big claim to fame is that it includes support for the latest 9.4 version of Adobe Flash. I had no trouble playing videos on the desktop version of YouTube in MicroB. In fact, MicroB handled every page I tried throwing at it. Most pages loaded at a default zoom level where text was readable with no horizontal scrolling needed on the N900's 800x480 px 3.5 inch screen. If you do want to adjust the zoom MicroB supports double-taping to zoom in plus a unique gesture based fine zoom. I found it easier and faster to get the desired zoom level using MicroB's swirling gesture than with the iPhone's pinch zoom. To zoom on the N900 you draw a little circle on the screen, clockwise to zoom in, counter clockwise to zoom out. The only thing holding back the usability of gestures in MicroB is the insensitivity of the resistive touch screen. Using a fingernail rather than a finger tip helps immensity but why doesn't Nokia's latest flagship phone have a capacitive screen? Still this is a great browser. Even with the resistive screen, I believe that the N900 browser is the best I've ever used on a phone. Maybe I'm missing something but it seems a little too gimmicky and not very intuitive.
Three members of Mozilla's Fennec team showed up to demonstrate the unreleased 5th Beta of Maemo on an N900. TnkGrl caught the demo on video. I didn't get any hands-on with Fennec but it seemed quick and responsive, unlike previous Fennec Beta's I've tried on Windows Mobile phones. Fennec features an unusual UI paradigm where you slide a finger toward different edges of the screen to bring up various menus.
Unlike MicroB, which uses a stripped down subset of the full Mozilla stack lacking support for some Firefox add-ons and SVG, Fennec includes virtually every core feature in desktop Firefox. At the meet up Mozilla demonstrated Weave running on the N900. Weave is a Firefox add-on that synchronizes bookmarks, tabs, browsing history and remembered passwords across multiple browsers both desktop and mobile.
Fennec
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posted by Dennis Bournique
October 30, 2009 @ 5:53 pm
7 View Comments
