gali

Well, it’s something of the of an era for me, or at least a hiatus of said era. I’ve had a Symbian phone since I got my Nokia 9210 Communicator around 2001, and I was using the OS before that back in the days of my Psion Series 5. As of yesterday, my main handset stopped being one that runs Symbian, as my N97 found itself replaced by a Nokia N900 running Nokia’s Linux-based system, Maemo 5.

The decision did not come lightly, but it was a long time coming. I love Symbian, and will continue to do so. I expect that in 18 months time when my contract next comes up for renewal, I will be tempted to go back.

As I always do as my current contract comes to its end, I looked at what I do with my phone on a daily or weekly basis, considered what I was interested in being able to do, and then looked at the options out there. A previous blog post looks at some of these things.

It was obvious that I was going to look at a new smartphone, with plenty of functionality and software that would break it out of the ‘phoning/texting’ device and into the realms of an always-connected mobile computer. Ultimately, it became quite clear that most of the ‘popular’ smartphones out there wouldn’t satisfy my needs. I wanted to stick with a large, high resolution touch screen (Blackberry out of the question, iPhone weak). I wanted an open platform that would let me install a range of applications, ideally chosen from a pool of useful tools that weren’t blocked by a strict QA process (iPhone now out of the question). It needed a decent camera, hardware keyboard, plenty of on-board storage and generally good hardware supporting a responsive, well thought out UI.

While the N900 lets itself down in a few arbitrary areas (why is there no MMS support, Nokia?), it was quite apparent that it was the only device that satisfied the things I was looking for. In fact, the only other device that came close was the Nokia N97 (and its little brother the N97 mini), and I wasn’t keen on upgrading to what I already had. A look at the internal specs of the N900 and some visual reviews of its blindingly quick interface had me sold – no more jerky interface or RAM issues that had been plaguing my N97 when I really pushed it.

Given I spend a fair amount of time on the web, the iPhone did get a brief consideration, based on its supposedly having the best mobile browsing experience out there. So I looked at the n900′s browser a little more closely, and what followed cemented my decision. While the N900 lacks multitouch gestures, its browser makes up for it by essentially being a full, lightning fast version of Firefox (albeit with no Firefox branding) with full Javascript and Flash support… and the N900 has the hardware to handle it well. It doesn’t quite manage 100/100 on the acid3 test, but it gets close. Combine it with the very nice 800 pixel wide screen and it was onto a winner.

So, I’m happy with my N900. I’ll probably be even more happy once I’ve stopped installing random junk and experimenting, and have something that I can use on a day to day basis. The biggest risk is that I will hack into place a number of bits and pieces that aren’t possible outside a hackable-Linux environment and will ultimately put myself into a position where I cannot go back to Symbian. On the other hand, maybe Symbian in its journey from Symbian^1 to Symbian^4 over the next year will get its user interface sorted and earn its place at the top once again (despite it never actually letting go of it in terms of sales).

And as a passing note, the N900 seems to succeed where just about all other Nokia phones fail by having a battery meter that represents how much battery is genuinely left, rather than a seemingly arbitrary scale that’s apparently adjusted based on current use.