Nokia N900

The Nokia N900 is a 3G, Linux smartphone with XTerm built in. If the idea of hacking your phone down to the command line with the manufacturer's full approval sends you into paroxysms of joy, forget reading the rest of this review and just buy one now. This is the ultimate Linux geek phone. But for the rest of us, it's an uneven and unfinished experience.

The N900 is the descendant of Nokia's impractical Internet Tablet line, a family of bulky devices that didn't connect to cellular networks. By turning a tablet into a phone and including Microsoft Exchange syncing, Nokia is seeking to make the N900 into a practical, do-everything handheld.

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The phone is chunky, but still small enough to hold in your hand. Measuring 4.37 by 2.55 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and weighing 6.38 ounces, it's slightly larger than the HTC Touch Pro2 Windows Mobile phones. It has a 3.5-inch, 800-by-480 resistive touch screen and no hard buttons on the front—not even Home or Call buttons, which make the N900 a little perplexing to make calls on. On the top of the device, there are power, volume, and camera buttons, but still no Home or Call. On the back, a shutter cover protects the 5-megapixel camera, with its unusually bright, hideously bluish flash.

Slide up the screen to reveal a beautiful backlit keyboard of clicky keys. The layout is a little off—the space bar is too far to the right—but the keys feel great.

All About Maemo
The N900 runs Maemo 5, a Linux OS based on Debian with a GTK-based GUI. Some of it is open source and some of it isn't, but Nokia is more than comfortable with people hacking this device. In fact, the company runs a Web site encouraging people to do so.

The Maemo interface is strange. It has the usual system of icons and widgets, but without the usual menus or home button. Tapping various parts of the screen does inconsistent things: The upper-left corner can display the program menu or minimize a window; the upper-right corner might close a program or pull up a settings menu. When a program takes up only part of the screen, tapping outside the program's box dismisses it. The interface is beautiful and certainly learnable, but just a few steps past intuitive.

Maemo 5 works smoothly on the N900's chipset. The N900 uses a 600-MHz, Cortex-A8–based TI OMAP3 platform with a PowerVR SGX graphics chip, making it about as powerful as the iPhone 3GS. There's an amazing 32GB of onboard storage, plus a microSD card slot under the back cover.

Depending on how geeky you are, there are either 11 apps or thousands of apps available for the N900. Nokia's Ovi Store isn't yet available for the N900, so you download apps through the phone's App Manager. By default, the App Manager only shows 11 available apps, which include things like Tetris, Chess, and MahJong games; AP News, Twitter or weather widgets; or the DocumentsToGo Microsoft Office reader.

But wait. By expanding the phone's available "repositories" (which is not explained anywhere on the phone) you can find and download various other apps. More apps are kicking around the Internet as .deb packages. You can even install a full version of Debian on the tablet, although that takes triumphant hackery.

And there we have it again. If installing Debian is your idea of a fun Saturday night, this is the Best Phone Ever. If not, you get 11 apps.

Maemo's Discontents
The N900 is a quad-band EDGE, 900/1700/2100-MHz 3G phone with Wi-Fi, meaning it works on T-Mobile's 3G network but not AT&T's. That's OK—T-Mobile offers, in its Even More Plus plan, the best service plan in the nation for this phone. (For why, read my column "Your Free Phone Cost $240.")

Out of the box, my N900 came misconfigured for T-Mobile's network, and I had to hunt down and change the APN before I could get data service. If locating APN details is your idea of a fun Saturday night—you get the picture.

There are more missing links in Maemo's chain. Exchange syncing only works with Exchange 2007 servers, not Exchange 2003. In most apps, there's no portrait mode—you can only use the device when you hold it horizontally. Nokia's Web site recommends you install the PC Suite 7.1 software on Windows computers to sync with the N900, but then PC Suite complains it's not fully compatible. (Most notably, it won't reformat music and video for the N900.)

Nokia says most of these issues will be fixed in future updates, with the first update coming within the next few weeks. The N900 will get Ovi Store, proper Exchange syncing, and more. But the N900 is already on sale in this unfinished form