Yesterday, I distractedly started playing with my new Nokia N900.

Depending on your perspective, you can think of this as a cell phone, a camera, a media player, a game console, or a computer, and I’ll try to share a few of my thoughts about this from each perspective.

The N900 Cellphone

When I received the N900, I took the SIM card out of my Motorola Razr V3xx, provisioned by AT&T and slid it into the SIM slot for the N900. Initially, the N900 did not recognize the card. I’m not sure if I didn’t put it in right or what, but eventually, after taking it out and putting it back in again, it fired up.

As a cellphone, it’s pretty nice. It came with nice stereo headphones and microphone so it can be used in a hands free manner without needing to purchase additional equipment. It also supports Bluetooth and I’m going to test my Bluetooth hands free device at some point. The speaker phone works nicely on it and the contacts list is pretty nice. It combines phone contact information with other types of contact information such as email addresses and IM addresses. Skype is fully integrated, so when I select a contact I’m giving the option of how to call them, on Skype, or on their cell phone.

It is a little bit bigger and more bulky than my previous cellphone, but not so much as to be annoying, or at least not yet. I haven’t tried carrying it around with me for an extended period.

My biggest gripe with the N900 Cellphone is that it does not currently support MMS, so I need to send pictures and videos other ways.

The N900 Camera

After working with a Razr with a 1.3 megapixel camera, where the pictures always seemed to come out blurry, the 5 megapixel N900 camera is amazing. Not only does it have a better CCD for processing the image, but it has a great lens and a flash. It shoots high quality video. As a downside, my Canon SD1000 probably has at least as good a lens and a 7.1 megapixel CCD. The SD1000 also has a lot more modes, the ability to zoom and so on. Even the SD1000 pales in comparison to a good DSLR.

In terms of uploading, the Razr was actually better in that I could send pictures to several sites at the same time using MMS. As noted above, the N900 does not support MMS, but I hope it will soon. Because of this, I need to use other tools to upload pictures. The N900 makes it easy, providing you have an Internet connection (more on that later), and provided that you only want to send to one service at a time. Also, the services you can share with seem a bit limited. I will have to work on configuring this better as I experiment with the camera.

The N900 Media Center

I don’t use MP3 players very often, and have ended up using the Razr as my MP3 player. I had a good collection of songs on a microSD card on my Razr. I took this card and stuck it in the microSD slot in the N900 and all my songs were there, sounding great; the same for my videos. It also had some pretty high res videos that came as a sample, much better than anything I ever shot with the old Razr. It has a nice connection to the RCA inputs for an analog TV and we watched a few videos that way. One of my todos is to see if I can rip DVDs and save the videos for watching on the N900. It could be a pretty nice portable DVD player.

The N900 Game Console

When my eldest daughters were younger, I used to tell them that they could play any game on the computer that they could program. The N900 is a great programming environment and I’ve started programming there. With that, I haven’t started playing any games on it yet, although I have heard stories of people playing some classic games on the N900.

The N900 Computer

This takes me to the aspect that I’m most interested in, the N900 as a Linux computer. It connected quickly and easily to my home Wifi. It supported an Xterminal so I could easily get to the command prompt. Yet there wasn’t an easy way to get root privileges.

Not only is the operating system a Linux flavor, it acts very much like Debian or Ubuntu, which means that it has a nice way of packaging and sharing applications. Normally, this is locked down, but there is a ‘red pill’ mode for the applications catalog. The section about the ‘red pill’ mode also provides details on how to get root access.

One of the methods was installing OpenSSH. This allows me to use SSH to connect from the N900 to other computers as well as connect to the N900 from other computers and copy files back and forth.

While it is great to have a keyboard on the N900, I still like working from a full size keyboard, so while I’m working on testing and setting up the computer, I’m using SSH to connect from other computers at home and use their keyboards, as well as copy files over from these other computers.

Also, in a desire to keep my mobile phone charges to a minimum, I have not been connecting to the AT&T data network most of the time, and have only connected to my local network. With that, I found two tools that I like that really help. One is ‘Personal IP address’. This displays the IP address that the N900 currently uses. It provides a nice way of keeping an eye on if you are connected, and if so, how. The other is Personal Dataplan Monitor. It keeps track of how much data usage you’ve used from your mobile provider.

I set these up and they took default places on the desktop. Later, I installed the Facebook Widget and Photo Updater. Unfortunately, as I experimented, I managed to remove the Dataplan monitor from the desktop and loaded the Facebook Widget on top of the IP address.

It took me a while before I figured out that by clicking on the background, I could bring up the Desktop Menu, which allows me to move items around on the desktop. Now I have each of these applications loaded where I want.

I experimented with the browser a little bit and found it fairly hard to read. You can’t use that two fingered stretch to zoom in on the page the way you can with an iPhone. Instead, you need to draw circles. Clockwise zooms in, counter clockwise zooms out. You can do this with your finger, but I’ve found making very small circles with the stylus works much better. Likewise, I later figured out that I could change the font on the Xterminal to make that much more readable as well.

With all of this working nicely, I was ready to start playing with the programming. This takes me to my other largest gripe with the N900. Currently, it does not support Java. There are notes on the Maemo Wiki about Java for the N900. I’ve started the process of downloading (Build 39) Early Access Headful EABI, glibc 2.5, Hard Float (VFP) Little Endian Java SE for Embedded 6.0 Update 10 ARMv6. Sun sure makes it hard to download the software and then makes it available for only 90 days, so I’ll probably abandon Sun and go with OpenJDK in future tests unless Sun becomes better to work with. I did manage to install the Sun Java but can’t get it to run in the browser. I’ll probably try some other Java tests later.

What has been more promising has been working with QT. I tried installing pyside-qt4-gui, but that was enough to use up all of my space in the root file system and I ended up being unable to receive anymore text messages, so I removed that and autoremoved the other packages that it installed. I also found some other trash I could remove, so I have a little more space in the root file system.

I also managed to take a little bit of the QT programming I had done in C++ and ported it to the N900. One was QWaveClient. It doesn’t look very good on the N900 yet and has been crashing. Time to do a little debugging on that. The other was a simple counter written from pieces of code I found laying around. It works pretty nicely and maybe a framework for a future blog post about programming for the N900.