Are new operating systems in the smart phone field hurting Nokia?

My friend, Ranesh Kumar considered picking up a new Nokia handset before he heard about the new Motorola Droid. Just last week, he bought two Motorola Droids from Verizon, one for himself and one for his fiancée.

Nokia_e70Ranesh was a Nokia fan for a long time and had owned few Nokia’s including an E70. But he made the transition to Verizon for a decent deal on a Voyager two years ago (because he likes qwerty keyboards and that was the only one he liked at the time). Ranesh couldn’t wait for a decent Nokia device to hit the market he liked, so he took the plunge. When he tested out the N97, he was terribly disappointed with the overall OS and decided to hold out for the Christmas season of this year to see what was around the corner and settled on the Motorola Droid running the Android 2.0 OS. Continue reading “Are new operating systems in the smart phone field hurting Nokia?”

Nokia N900 Photo Gallery And N810 Comparison

We recently had a chance to play with the new Nokia N900, or the hottest device to come from the Finnish manufacturer in a long time, based on the Maemo 5 platform. The N900 features a design very similar to the N97, with a full touchscreen and a slide-out qwerty keyboard. The differences though stop there, as the N900 is way superior in terms of processor, RAM, UI intuitiveness, browser, and many other aspects that we won’t go into right now.

But we thought we’d snap a couple of pictures for you to enjoy and drool on, while waiting for the N900’s official release on the market. Here they are. Remember that you can click on the thumbnails to view the full resolution image.

Continue reading “Nokia N900 Photo Gallery And N810 Comparison”

Nokia N900 Fondle Video

During Nokia World 2009, we had a chance to fondle Nokia’s latest and greatest Maemo device, the N900. The new Maemo interface is still a mystery to many of us, since we only had time to play with it for a couple of minutes, and we’re not really sure how it’ll behave under everyday usage.

nokia-n900-fondle Continue reading “Nokia N900 Fondle Video”

Win a N900 by Hacking it at Push N900

Push N900

After the mega launch of Nokia N900 at the Nokia World ‘09, Nokia has come up with an interesting contest for all the developers, hackers and modders called “PUSH N900“.

Nokia describes Push N900 as “An unique design, hacking & modding project from Nokia.  We want to give designers, hackers, modders, creatives and artists the chance to get their hands on, and heads inside, the new Nokia N900 & the Maemo platform – the most powerful pairing we’ve ever created”

Event brief

You will have to tell Nokia how you would hack and mod the N900 & Maemo to connect the N900 to something you love.  An expert judging panel will be selecting winning submissions and the groups behind the winning entries will receive N900 devices, funding and support to develop their PUSH idea. And once they’re complete, we’ll share them with the rest of the world with a series of installations in Nokia Flagship Stores across the globe.

Already a lot of buzz is present around Nokia N900 and this event is just going increase the buzz by many folds. Just imagine the quality of apps which will be created with a lot of hackers, modders and artist getting together to create apps for the Maemo OS.

Few companies like Hyper and Tinker.it have already got together and started working on a sample project for the PUSH N900 launch event. A project which dealt with a mashup of a Speak ‘n’ Spell, a Rolodex, 80’s radio tagger/Last.fm integration and 3D ViewMaster camera.

A Speak and Spell was used to text a message to a member of the audience, a Rolodex then identified a contact’s details after being manually spun and automatically pulled it up on the phone, an FM radio hack then identified any ‘80’s musician texted to the phone and connected to Last.fm to pull up the relevant cover art as you tuned the radio to a station playing the selected artist’s music, and finally a View-Master which used Nokia N900 to create custom 3D photos.

Interested to create a similar mashup or create another unique application for Nokia N900? Then rush with your ideas/proposals here.

Submissions for Nokia PUSH N900 are accepted until October 5th 2009. The proposals can be either a video proposal, or a written proposal or even visual proposal. The winning submissions and the winners will be announced on October 25th 2009.

Submit Ideas for Nokia PUSH N900