Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Nokia N900 – First Impressions

After the dissapointing N97 it was all to easy to dismiss Nokia as a fading star of mobile phone design. The flagship which failed to float was the perfect excuse for a whole horde of doomsayers to predict the end of the once-greatest mobile company. A common quip was that unless Nokia were to pull off something entirely miraculous it would be “the end”. Fortunately the N900 is the miracle we had all hoped for, a truly remarkable combination of new software and hardware.

It’s hard to disentangle all the novelty in this new phone: Not only is it the first of a brand new form-factor (the sliding landscape keyboard-phone), but it’s also the first phone in Nokia’s huge portfolio to feature Maemo, an operating system entirely new to the world of phones. That’s not to say that Maemo is new: It’s been on the market since 2006 but only on Nokia’s ultra-niche tablet computers. Mameo itself has an even longer pedigree – it’s an offshoot of Debian Linux, a highly regarded variant of the increasingly popular desktop operating system.

First of all, lets deal with the easy stuff- the hardware: Nokia vastly simplified the slider mechanism compared to the N97. Instead of the elaborate slide and tilt, this keyboard simply slides out from behind the screen. While it doesn’t look so impressive it makes for a device which is both more comfortable and rugged. The new keyboard is slightly wider than the N97s since they ditched the somewhat useless D-pad. I guess they figured out that users don’t actually need a d-pad and a touch-screen if the touch screen is good enough.

Ony of my big criticisms of the N97 was it’s insensitive touch screen. At the time I put this down to the fact that Nokia had chosen the older “resistive” technology rather than the more trendy “capacitive” screens used by the iPhone and most android devices. The N900 has not switched to capacitative, and yet the screen seems a great deal more responsive. I’ve not yet encountered the frequent false-clicks of the older model. Nokia claim that the advantage of a resistive screen is that you can be more precise. This is why the N900 has a concealed stylus which slides out of the front. It’s not actually possible to use a stylus on a capacitative screen, so Nokia clearly see this as giving their customers wider choices.

The other major criticism of the N97 was that it seemed sluggish compared to the high-end phones: Once again this has seems to have been fixed. Even while multitasking the N900 seems to have the processing power to stay lively and responsive. This is no doubt a consequence of the shift to Nokia’s next generation operating system. Maemo is the phone’s biggest new feature: It’s an operating system unlike anything I’ve seen before on a mobile, but oddly similar to almost everything I’ve used on my desktop.

Unlike Symbian which was custom designed for telephony, Maemo was built for the Internet. The ability to make calls via the telephone network was a relatively recent addition to this operating system. As a consequence they’ve approached the idea of how telephone stuff ought to work in a radically different way: The most obvious benefit is that there’s a single framework for calling which handles VOIP (e.g. Skype and Google Talk) in exactly the same consistent way as a “regular” phone call. Likewise the messaging infrastructure seamlessly integrates SMS text messages with twitter, facebook and email. It all seems connected to a degree I’ve never seen before.

I dont want to give the impression that it was entirely perfect:

The biggest problem with Maemo today is a complete lack of commercial apps. None of the official Google Apps (e.g. Mail, Maps) have been ported to Symbian. It also lacks some of my favourites such as Spotify, BBC iPlayer and Last.fm. There’s no technical reason to doubt that these applications will eventually be ported to Maemo, however early adopters might need to beware that they might have to do without their favourite apps.

As compensation for the lack of apps, the web-browser is really good: Good enough (for example) to use the web-versions of Twitter, and BBC iPlayer. The built in multimedia conceals some pleasant surprises, such as the fact that that the it can handle high-definition DivX movie files and Ogg audio files. No other device I can think of can play all of these non-commerical formats despite the fact that they are hugely popular in the free-software world.

This lack of apps might seem scary, especially in comparison to Apple’s much hyped hundred-thousand but it’s not likely to be a problem in the long term: Unlike the older generation of phone which was built around proprietary code which was difficult for developers to learn the N900 is built on technology that is common today and widely used. Anybody who can develop for Linux can develop for this phone which means that there are already hundreds of thousands of developers who have the skills required to build Maemo apps. As a consequence I expect that Maemo will quickly catch up other platforms since the cost of building for this platform is relatively low.

So is the N900 the “iPhone Killer” that everybody’s been pining for? No, and thankfully not. I think this product represents an entirely new territory for the mobile phone industry. Rather than replicate Apple’s model of a tightly controlled environment, Nokia are emphasizing openness by borrowing a strategy which has worked so well for the open-source movement. This is the most open mobile platform on the market today, and I feel that proposition alone will draw in the “core” of developers who will in turn deliver the novel applications which will usher in a wider audience.

Chumby One – First impressions

I just received my Chumby One – the budget version of last year’s most hyped internet device. These days they are positioning it as the world’s most advanced bedside clock radio (which would be true apart from the fact that Pure Digital just launched the relatively expensive Sensia ).

Upon unboxing the device my first surprise was the size of the thing. The official photography gives the impression of a device which might be approximately fifteen to twenty cm wide. The actual device is slightly more than ten centimetres, and that’s including the volume knob which sticks out the side. It’s a really compact device.

Chumby comes with an international power adaptor. Set-up of the device consists of nothing more than attaching this to a wall-socket, plugging in the Chumby One and then answering some simple questions about the local WiFi connection. Initial set-up takes about five minutes. From then on all you have to do is choose what widgets you want and set up your multimedia.

There’s a wide selection of useful widgets, for example local five-day weather (provided by the BBC) or a the next 24 hours in your Google calendar. There are also some quite bizarre ones: The default channel includes a selection of popular videos from youtube and “Prelenger Mash-ups” which are wired video compositions assembled from the historical oddities curated at archive.org. You can also set up a Flickr.com viewer which converts the Chumby into a not particularly high-resolution digital photo frame. There are also quite a few social networking widgets including at least ten different ways to present your twitter feed along with some quite good facebook viewers.

All of the above would give the impression that Chumby is intended to be a practical device. Most of the widgets are rather silly and useless compared to the ones I have listed. Finding the good ones took about half an hour of search and at this point I’m convinced that most of the rest are redundant: There are a few hundred different variations on the idea of clock, and an awful lot of quite boring flash games which I shall pretend do not exist.

The other part of Chumby’s claim to fame is it’s multimedia: It comes with the ability to play internet radio and FM. I found the FM receiver was not particularly sensitive. It was barely able to receive very strong signals from nearby transmitters. That’s possibly a consequence of placing an FM receiver in the same tiny box as an active WiFi transceiver. I wonder why they bothered? Surely the people who buy this sort of device want it for it’s Internet capabilities.

Fortunately the Internet radio feature really does work. Unlike the widgets which are controlled via your web-browser from a PC, the multimedia features are controlled exclusively via the Chumby’s touch-screen. I’m not sure why they did this since the screen is rather small and it’s very difficult to select which from the thousands of Internet radio streams you want to hear.

The audio browser is very bad: In order to hear something you must first select from a range of sources including Pandora (not available in Europe), MediaFly, manually configured streams, FM Radio, a whole bunch of obscure audio aggregators, media files available via the USB or network. Having chosen your source you are then presented with multiple levels of hierarchical menu in order to select the actual audio audio you want to hear.

This part of the Chumby experience really does not work very well since switching from one kind of audio to another is a real nuisance. Even a modest DAB radio makes changing channels easy compared to this. I suspect that Chumby users will simply pick one audio source and leave it set to that rather than have the bother of browsing. I hope Chumby Industries find a way to simplify this – they could use the same web-interface they use to manage their widgets for audio.

Incidentally, this is how Pure and Reciva based radios work: You do all your browsing via a normal web-browser from your PC. On the device there’s no need to browse a huge menu – you can select from the favourites which you have already chosen.

In summary, I’m happy with the device. It’s an interesting addition to my bedroom. It looks rather silly opposite my wife’s substantially more expensive (and stylish) Pure Sensia which can play a wider variety of sounds. The Chumby One by comparison is better at playing video and has a much wider selection of widgets.