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As underwhelmed as I was by Nokia’s recent Booklet announcement, I am just as deeply impressed by the next product that Nokia is pulling out of it’s bag of tricks. There have been leaks all over the place for about a month that Nokia was on the verge of releasing a phone of some kind that dropped Symbian in favor of the open source OS they have been flirting with for ages, Maemo. Well, now it is official, but it isn’t a phone, it is a 3G MID with phone capabilities, a 3.5 inch touchscreen and slide out QWERTY called the N900 and it looks to be made of win.

Here are some tidbits from Nokia’s press release…

The Nokia N900 packs a powerful ARM Cortex-A8 processor, up to 1GB of application memory and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration. The result is PC-like multitasking, allowing many applications to run simultaneously. Switching between applications is simple, as all running content is constantly available through the dashboard. The panoramic homescreen can be fully personalized with favorite shortcuts, widgets and applications.

To make web browsing more enjoyable, the Nokia N900 features a high-resolution WVGA touch screen and fast internet connectivity with 10/2 HSPA and WLAN. Thanks to the browser powered by Mozilla technology, websites look the way they would on any computer. Online videos and interactive applications are vivid with full Adobe Flash(TM) 9.4 support. Maemo software updates happen automatically over the internet.

On top of that, the N900 includes integrated Bluetooth 2.1, FM transmitter and GPS; a full stack of standard phone features including 3-way conference calling, Microsoft Exchange support as well as the ability to handle up to 10 email accounts; 32GB of internal storage, microSD expansion  and 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens.

In a word…WANT.

Considering all the people who were saying that these Maemo rumors meant that Nokia was going to deep six S60 (as ludicrous as that sounded when it is the most used mobile OS worldwide by a wide margin), Nokia took great pains to make a clear division between Symbia and Maemo by having Jonathan Arber, a Senior Research Analyst and IDC, say the following…

Just as Nokia continues to expand and diversify its device portfolio, so it is deploying multiple platforms to allow it to serve different purposes and address different markets. While we have seen continued growth in Symbian as a smartphone platform, Maemo enables Nokia to deliver new mobile computing experiences based on open-source technology that has strong ties with desktop platforms.

OK, that didn’t convince me any more than Google’s “Android walks sideways and Chrome OS will walk straight” argument. I have no doubt that Nokia isn;t going to let all the work they have put into Symbian go to waste, but personally I feel that we will begin seeing Maemo on smartphones in much the way Microsoft will be using WinMo 7…a two track attack with S60 on mid level smartphones and Maemo on the iPhone Killers.

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Zealot (476 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).