The Nokia Phone Blog

Should you use Firefox Mobile or the stock N900 MicroB browser? [A Comparison]

ang — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:43:06 +0000

There’s a browser war going on, but it’s not the typical IE vs. Firefox series of battles. No, on the N900 it’s Mozilla vs. Mozilla, brother vs. brother, with the stock MicroB browser on one side and the latest Firefox Mobile 1.0 on the other. Which one is better? It’s a tough call, that’s for sure.

I tested both browsers under the same conditions (Home wi-fi connection, clean reboot, empty caches) with my Nokia N900. For the timing tests, I used XNote Timer and took the average of three times.

And now for today’s events…

Startup Time

How long it takes each browser to open and load the default screen, after a clean reboot.

Firefox: 7.06 secs
MicroB: (stock browser) 3.79 secs

Loading Static Web Pages

How long it takes to open up the famous “Nokia Phone Blog” and others.

Firefox
The Nokia Phone Blog: 11.96 secs
Consumerist: 14.17 secs
eBay: 7.56 secs

MicroB
The Nokia Phone Blog: 8.75 secs
Consumerist: 13.47 secs
eBay: 7.09 secs

In addition to loading pages slightly faster than Firefox, MicroB seemed to be more responsive when scrolling around large web pages.

Loading Flash Web Pages

The time necessary to load Macromedia’s official Flash page with embedded video, and a Colbie Caillat YouTube music video – “Begin Again”.

Firefox
Flash.com (redirects to macromedia flash site): 32.42 secs
YouTube video: 12.45 secs

MicroB
Flash.com: 40.05 secs
YouTube video, same as above: 13.17 secs

Firefox definitely seems to handle Flash loading better than MicroB. I’m not quite sure why. When it came to actual videos, however, both browsers sucked pretty equally, with lots of choppiness.

Ease of Use/User Interface

Firefox
Firefox uses a finger-friendly swiping interface mechanic, with tabs on left side, options/bookmarks on the right, and the menu bar on top. Overall it’s quite intuitive, even though you’ll probably open the side menus accidentally at some point when navigating regular web sites.

My problems with the Firefox user interface were fairly minor – for some reason, Firefox tends to display nearly everything in a Times New Roman/Serif-ish type of font. I don’t know why. Nor did I see any options to change it (even in about:config, but I could have missed it). Keypad scrolling is painfully slow, since there’s no kinetic scrolling when using the arrow keys. And there’s definitely a lack of polish when it comes to icons, buttons, and other animations.

MicroB
MicroB interface is simple and clean. I liked being able to zoom in and out of web pages quickly by drawing circles on the screen, but at the same time the whole “mouseover” mode never really felt (or worked) right for me. And why is there no real “back” button? The back arrow goes to the History screen, which means an extra tap + another second or two waiting for the history screen to appear. Considering how much the back button gets used, I’m surprised that Nokia added an intermediate step instead of just emulating normal browser behavior of going back to the previous page immediately.

Bugginess/Stability

How often a browser crashes, or exhibits “unpredictable” behavior.

Firefox
Occasionally quit after opening. I couldn’t really duplicate the problem with much accuracy though.

MicroB
No issues, even when attempting to load bloatware sites like Yahoo! Mail.

Memory Usage

This one was probably the least scientific of all the tests. To measure memory usage, I power-cycled the phone, connected to my wi-fi network, opened up each browser, and went to Facebook.com. I then monitored the memory usage with the top command in X Terminal.

Firefox: 20.0% memory usage
MicroB: 27.9% total memory usage (12.8% browserd + 9.6% browserd + 5.5% browser)

I thought this was kind of interesting, considering that I have previously figured MicroB to be the smaller, leaner of the two when it came to memory footprints (not to mention that Firefox’s reputation with regards to memory usage hasn’t been too solid). However, apparently to decrease browser loading time, the MicroB browser was broken up into a couple different components – more about that here. So while MicroB definitely starts up faster, it also eats up more memory.

Extensions and Add-ons

Firefox
Decent support for extensions. There’s an add-on search and installation is as simple as tapping the “Add to Firefox” button. To get Flash working, however, you’ll need to follow these steps.

One extension of some note is Weave, which allows you to sync your Firefox settings over multiple devices, such as your phone and pc – keeping the same preferences, tabs, bookmarks, and history everywhere. It’s pretty cool to say the least.

MicroB
Bare-bones add-on support. No direct search capabilities, although you can always find extensions with Google. You’re also stuck with the “Nokia Single Sign On For Ovi” plug-in – it can’t be uninstalled. Bleh.

Browser-Exclusive Features

Firefox
Tabbed browsing, extensions search, Weave, customizability.

MicroB
Save webpages/images, find on page.

Conclusion

It’s hard to say with certainty which browser is truly “better”. If you’re looking for the speediest one of the two, the stock MicroB browser is quicker starting up and rendering static (non-Flash) pages. However, Firefox is slightly faster when it comes to Flash intensive pages like YouTube. It’s also more featured than the competition, even though it’s missing simple things like saving web pages and images.

Personally, I find myself using MicroB for the most part, except when I want to take advantage of Firefox’s Weave Sync plugin to view the tabs I currently have open on my pc. MicroB just seems faster, especially when scrolling around.

How-To: Enable Flash in Firefox Mobile 1.0 [N900]

ang — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:41:06 +0000

The good news, first: Firefox Mobile 1.0 was been released for Maemo 5, and it brings a couple of sweet improvements to the table. Flash, however, is not one of them. It’s disabled by default, but it’s pretty easy to get it back with these simple steps.

The Setup

You’ll need the latest version of Firefox Mobile 1.0. Get it from the Mozilla Catalog repository (which should have been added with the Maemo PR 1.0 update) via Application Manager.

How To

1. In the address bar, type in about:config. You should get a warning message that asks you to confirm that you want to mess with the config options. Click the I’ll be careful, I promise! button.

2. You should be see the config box, with a search bar on top that says “Filter”. Type “plugin” into this bar and you should see a couple of options popup. The two we’re interested in here are the plugin.default_plugin_disabled and plugin.disable options: tap on each one (or use the arrow keys) and hit the enter button. This will change the value from true to false. Make sure you do this to both options!

3. Close Firefox and reopen it.

4. Enjoy your new Flash experience!

Nokia: Ovi Maps Now Free, a “Game-changing Move”

ang — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:53:47 +0000

A “secret” launch event early today (one that I’m sure many of us thought was for a new handset) brought the news that Nokia’s Ovi Maps will be completely free. That’s Drive and Walk navigation, Lonely Planet guides, the whole shebang. Free. And it’s available now. Sweet.

It’s a great move, but far from “game-changing”, that’s for sure. Pessimists could say it’s typical Nokia M.O. – moving to offer something after the competition, and in this case, Android Maps – but it’s still a welcome gesture.

The new application is available at Ovi Maps, and limited to S60 devices. You can also find the latest version of Nokia Map Loader there.

Meanwhile, N900 users unfortunately will still have to live with the travesty that is Maemo’s version of Ovi Maps, an app that I must say is one of the most useless navigational tools ever made.

No related posts.

Something a little different: Google Nexus One Review

ang — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:45:36 +0000

The Google Nexus One Review

Yep, I picked up a Google Nexus One. For me, it’s my first serious foray into Android and the land of the Eclairs, Donuts, and Cupcakes. Would Google’s full touch-screen phone entice me to completely drop my two-week-old Nokia N900?

Hardware

The Nexus One is a beautiful phone. Period. It feels expensive – contrast that to the N900, which just feels like high-quality plastic for the most part – and HTC has done a great job with the look and feel. The front and sides are some kind of metallic plastic mix, while the back cover has a rubbery (but not cheap rubber) feel. It’s super thin and well-built to boot.

The touch-screen is a large 3.7″ WVGA (800×480) AMOLED display, and pretty much everything looks superb on it. I have to admit, though, that I am not a big fan of the Nexus One’s capacitive touch-screen. It’s very finicky – sometimes you’ll be tapping on the screen in vain while the phone completely ignores you. It’s not a common occurence, just an unpleasant one. Say what you will, but I’d much rather deal with the slightly less sensitive resistive screen on the N900 because I feel like my fingernail taps are far more accurate.

This complaint also extends to the virtual keyboard, which I have found to be less than satisfying. I’ve probably mistyped 90% of the words on this phone. I just couldn’t get used to it, and it was always more of a hindrance than a help. And the onscreen keyboard in portrait mode? Don’t even get me started.

Other faults with the phone hardware are pretty minor: the camera lens does protrude a bit from the back of the phone, and you’ll probably end up accidentally smudging it several times like I did. The trackball is generally not too useful, except for those times when I needed to edit text (I couldn’t seem to insert the cursor into any text with any precision). The loudspeaker could’ve been louder – mainly because it’s located on the back of the phone, so when the phone is lying flat the sound is muted somewhat. Definitely missed a few calls thanks to that.

Finally, battery life was above average. I was never really in any danger of running low on battery life, but keep in mind I was using EDGE instead of HSPA as I’m still on AT&T, and the Nexus One is conveniently missing AT&T’s 850/1900 bands.

Software

The latest version of Android, 2.1, is extremely easy to use and well-suited for novice and expert smartphone users alike. It’s super fast, stylish, and intuitive. For the most part, at least. One annoyance: the Nexus One’s Home screen, which doesn’t support landscape mode. Doesn’t sound like a biggie, right? Try using the Google Search widget without a landscape keyboard: it’s damn near impossible.

Since this is a Google phone, there’s a lot of integration with Google’s core platforms – Gmail, Talk, Maps, etc. The apps are pretty much what you’d expect, honestly. Gmail works well. Google Talk works well. Maps works well, but I didn’t have much use for it without some kind of stand for my car.

One of the new features that the Nexus One brings to the table is speech recognition, or speech-to-text. The voice search feature worked surprisingly well, to the point of even recognizing really basic Chinese. That was cool. Realistically, though, I can’t see this being a useful form of text entry until we get to the point where you can just talk normally, sprinkling in voice commands with speech-to-text messages and searches. (like in say, Iron Man)

What I really liked about the software was the little touches that made the Nexus One stand out from the competition. By that I mean things like a running list of features using up the most battery, to the time elapsed since the last charge (why doesn’t every phone has this), to the live wallpapers, and even the factory reset, which actually functions like a factory reset and completely removes all traces of your information (unfortunately, your apps go with it). Super smooth kinetic scrolling everywhere was a cherry on top.

As for multi-tasking, well, I still don’t get it. I honestly have no idea what apps are open at any given time. It’s actually a little annoying. You can, however, remedy this with some third-party apps (Advanced Task Killer). It just seems sort of a strange that you’d need an outside app to do this.

There’s also no multi-touch, which I’m sure will offend a number of people on many levels. Coming from nothing by multi-touch-less phones, I can’t say that I really missed it. A review by Engadget’s review made a pretty good point though – the lack of multi-touch will certainly hurt gaming possibilities for the phone.

Comparing the Nexus One to the N900

The Nexus One has a lot going for it. It’s faster and has a far better user interface than the N900. There are a hell of a lot more apps on Android’s app store than there will, probably, ever be on Nokia’s Ovi store. And yet…I’m keeping my N900. The multi-tasking is far more robust, the keyboard is far more reliable, and – this might be the main reason – I just feel like I have more control with my Maemo-powered phone.

Of course, this thinking isn’t for everyone. There’s a good chance my priorities are different from yours. If you’re looking for a good iPhone substitute, the Nexus One is up there with the best of ‘em. It might even be the next best thing to the iPhone.

The N900 Gets Its First (Major) Update: PR1.1

ang — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:05:14 +0000

Grab the latest Maemo PR1.1 update now!

A massive 90MB update was released today for the Nokia N900. There are way, way too many changes to list here, so I’ll pull out a couple of the highlights:

- Performance improvements in Browser
- Silence ringing by flipping face down
- Lower RAM consumption while capturing video.
- Application Manager UI speed improvements.
- Email faster with large mailboxes.
- Maps: Route calculation and search performance improved.
- Improving WLAN connection stability
- Add voicemail shortcut support.
- HW volume keys always have same orientation.

Quite a number of community bugs were fixed, too. All in all a solid update.

View the complete changelog here.

The N900 Gets Its First (Mini) Update

ang — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:36:02 +0000

Got an N900? Great. Grab the first firmware update, released today. It’s available over-the-air in the Application Manager. Before updating, App. Manager will ask you if you want to backup your phone. I would suggest doing so.

The update’s only 18.5 megabytes, and the only changes that I can tell so far are:

- New icons for the Application Manager
- Faster performance when switching applications
- Browser seems noticeably faster
- Phone reverts back to the default Nokia Nseries theme
- Missed calls in Phone now show up as blue instead of red
- Ovi Catalog and Mozilla Catalog were added to the repositories list
- Also seems like my Internet radio stations were refreshed. Yuck.
- “Red Pill Mode” (allows installation of .deb Debian packages) has been removed

Other users over at talk.maemo are reporting less lag in the Media Player’s “All Albums” view. I can’t confirm this, but then I don’t have that many albums on here, only 33 or so.

How-To: Do Just About Anything on the Nokia N900

ang — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 05:36:58 +0000

The definitive how-to/FAQ for the Nokia N900.

Getting over the Nokia N900’s learning curve can be a long, arduous process. I’m here to make things a little easier. Essentially, this how-to/FAQ is a collection of all the things that I’ve learned so far, so expect it to get bigger in the future. And if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to add them in the comments.

First Things First

Get the Nokia N900 Manual

Nokia has the N900 manual available in PDF form here.

Do Stuff in Maemo 5

Make a Call

You need to launch the Phone application. This can be done in two ways:

1. Press the Power button, then select Phone from the drop-down menu.
2. Tap the Phone icon at the Menu (tap the shortcut key twice to get the standard Application Menu)

You can also add a Phone app shortcut to any of your desktops.

Switch to Silent or Airplane Mode

Hit the Power button and then select either Silent, or Offline Mode (airplane mode). You can also tap the clock on the desktop, and then select Profile to switch to silent.

Change My Ringtone or Other Tone Settings

Fire up Settings (available in the main Menu), and select Profiles. It’s the top-right-most option.

Lock the Screen

There are three ways to lock the screen:

1. Use the hardware lock/unlock switch located on the bottom of the phone
2. Press the Power button and select the Lock screen and keys option
3. Press the Power button twice.

I prefer the third method because the lock switch is in a pretty awkward spot.

Switch To Another Application

The N900 is all about the multitasking. Simply tap the Application menu icon (top left corner, it’s the icon with two boxes stacked on top of each other) or hit Ctrl-Backspace on the keyboard. This will show you a list of current running applications. Tap the Application menu area again to access the main menu.

Change a Contact’s Information

Believe it or not, you can’t do this from the Phone application. You need to run the “Contacts” application instead, found in the main Menu. The Contacts app also allows you to merge phone and chat contacts.

Find My N900’s IMEI and MAC Address

Launch the Settings application, and scroll all the way to the bottom to About Product. You can also see your phone’s current firmware version.

Check the Total Memory Available

Launch the Settings application, and scroll down to Memory. Tapping the Details button will give you a breakdown of the sizes of different file types.

Change the Desktop Theme or Background

At any desktop view, tap and hold for 2 seconds or tap anywhere on the screen and then tap the gear icon that pops up. Then tap the “Desktop Menu” title bar to bring up the “Change background” and “Themes” menu options.

Turn On/Off Bluetooth

At any desktop view, tap the clock/status area. From here you can turn on/off Bluetooth, quickly navigate to the Clock application, and disable/enable the current internet connection.

Activate the Landscape/Portrait Sensor For Phone Calls

Launch the Phone application (Power Button -> Phone or select Phone from the Menu). Tap the “Phone” title bar and select Turning control. This option allows you to automatically launch the Phone app whenever the N900 is held in Portrait mode.

Turn off Automatic Word Completion and Auto Capitalization

Open up Settings, and select Text input. Word completion is the third option in the menu. You can also turn off auto-capitalization here too.

Switch Keyboard Input Languages

Assuming you set up dual languages in Settings -> Text input, you can hit Ctrl + Spacebar on the keyboard to quickly switch input languages.

Change the Shortcuts in the Main Menu

You can’t change the shortcuts at this time. Most likely a bug.

Restore Factory Settings

Open up Settings, and tap the title bar. The “restore original settings” will appear.

Do Software-Related Stuff

Install New Software

Open up the Application Manager. This app will let you uninstall, download, and update your software. To start installing new software, tap the second option, Download. You’ll see a list of different categories – tap on one or All to browse the applications in that category. From here, tapping on an application will bring up the install window, which allows you to install the app or get more detailed information about it, such as what packages get installed.

Add New Repositories

Open up the Application Manager, and click the title tab:

Hit the Application Catalogs button. This will bring up a list of current repositories that you’re linked to. To add a new one, just tap the New button in the bottom right corner.

By default, the Extras repository isn’t enabled – just select it and toggle the enable switch to get it working.

You may want to add some of the following repositories:

Catalog name: Extras-dev
Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel
Distribution: fremantle
Components: free non-free

Extras-dev is where you’ll find all the alpha stuff. Warning: this is where you could find software that could potentially brick your phone, since the apps here aren’t really tested. That’s the standard disclaimer, anyway. In practice, I’ve found that extras-dev has most of the “cool” stuff. But you’ve been warned.

Catalog name: Extras-testing
Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing
Distribution: fremantle
Components: free non-free

Extras-testing is the next level up from extras-dev. Apps here aren’t fully tested, but they’re getting pretty close to full distribution.

Catalog name: Maemo emulators
Web address: http://b-man.xceleo.org/repo/maemo-nintendo-emulators/
Distribution:
Components: main

Found this one randomly (not sure where). Basically, it’s a repo for Maemo emulators like iNes.

Install Debian .deb Files

There’s two ways to install a Debian file on the N900: either activate Red Pill mode (a la Matrix), which adds a permanent option to your application manager, or use the X Terminal.

Method 1: Red Pill Mode – only works in stock N900 firmware

Load up the Application Manager, and tap the title bar (where it displays “Application Manager” and a down arrow). Select Application catalogs, then tap New in the resulting Catalogs box that pops up. This should bring up the “New Catalog” template – all you need to do here is change the Web address from http:// to matrix. Seriously. Now, instead of saving, tap outside of the box to quit – your N900 should ping and pop up a new box: “Which pill?” You want the Red pill.

Once you’ve successfully selected the Red pill option, if you tap the Application Manager’s title bar you should see a new option “Install from file”. Just navigate to your .deb file and you should be golden.

Note: I am not responsible for any damage that may occur as a result of installing any rogue Debian files.

Method 2: X Terminal

Fire up the X Terminal client. Type sudo gainroot, and navigate to the directory where your .deb is located. The command to install a package is:

dpkg -i name_of_package.deb

And that’s it!

Force an Application to Close

While you’re in the application, hit the Power button, and select End Current Task. This will work most of the time. If not, continue:

Open up X Terminal. To force an application to close, you use the kill command. However, you’ll need to know the application’s process id (PID). If you know the exact name of the process, you can use the following command to get the pid:

pidof process_name

If you only know a part of the name, or can guess a part of it, you can try this command:

ps aux | grep part_of_process_name

(note: the | character is the pipe symbol, you can find it by accessing the Sym. menu on the keyboard – press the blue arrow then Sym)

Using the ps command will give you a bunch of numbers and other random stuff. The PID is the leftmost number.

Once you’ve got the pid, executing the kill is as easy as:

kill pid

Take a Screenshot*

There’s no way to do this from within Maemo – you’ll need to install a separate program called load-applet. Once installed, tap the clock at any desktop view and select the camera icon. You’ll then have 20 seconds to get your screenshot ready – fully press the Camera key to take the screenshot.

Get Help With X Terminal Commands

You can add “–help” (that’s two dashes, no quotes) after any command to get a list of options. Basically the substitute for the “man” pages.

For example: dpkg –help

Optimize Stuff

Find CPU-Hogging Applications and Processes

The top command in X Terminal allows you to view all running processes, along with how much CPU and memory each process uses. Great for checking to see what’s wasting your battery.

To use, simply open up X Terminal, and type “top” at the shell.

Maximize Your Battery Life

The N900’s battery life is fairly decent to start with, but you can get more out of each charge with a couple of simple tips:

1. Lower the phone display brightness and change the backlight time-out to 10 seconds. Also, disable touch-screen vibration and enable Power saving mode. Located in Settings -> Display.
2. Turn off the notification light. Settings -> Notification light.
3. Turn off all key and touch-screen sound effects. Settings -> Profiles.
4. Turn off Bluetooth. Settings -> Bluetooth.
5. Force wi-fi/WLAN to only connect manually. Settings -> Internet connections.
6. Change your wi-fi/WLAN transmission power to 10 mW. Settings -> Internet connections -> Connections -> (select access point) -> Edit -> Next -> Next -> Advanced -> Other -> Wi-Fi Transmission Power.
6. Close any running applications that aren’t necessary.
7. If the E-mail application is set to automatically update, increase the Update interval. E-mail application -> Settings.
8. If the RSS feed reader is set to automatically update, increase the Update interval. RSS application -> Settings.
9. Turn off the GPS and disable network positioning. Settings -> Location.

Nokia N900 Review: A Multi-Tasking Monster

ang — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:44:32 +0000

Nokia's latest smartphone is also its most capable.

The Nokia N900 is the latest and greatest smartphone brought to you by the same folks that brought you the not-so-great N97. But the N900 isn’t cut from the same cloth: it has a snappy operating system, faster processor, and a nice collection of completely free apps. Will the N900 follow the same path as Nokia’s last smartphone? Or is it destined for something greater?

Full review inside.

Hardware

At first glance, the N900 looks just like Nokia’s N97 smartphone. It’s big, heavy, and mostly plastic, but it’s also stylish and solid. No creaking here.

One potential issue lies with the N900’s landscape mode. The phone was meant to be (almost) exclusively used in landscape mode, and this is reflected in the N900’s button placements. The Power/On switch is located on the side of the phone, and the lock/unlock switch is on the bottom. It’s awkward, since most people (myself included) are used to one-handed phone operation.

The QWERTY keyboard is pretty much average, but it’s still a huge leap from the squishiness of the Nokia N97 keyboard. My main gripe is the button hardness – you have to push the keys harder than you’d expect. Because of this, it’s difficult to type quickly. The key placement isn’t horrible, but new users will have to get used to the space bar to the right of the M key, and the placement of the Symbol/Ctrl and Caps keys.

To be completely honest, the N900 phone hardware is really nothing amazing – there are other phones out there with better features. What really makes (or breaks) the N900 is the software.

Software

The N900 runs Maemo 5, a Linux-based operating system. It’s the same OS that Nokia introduced with its line of internet tablets. This is good for two reasons: first, there’s a decent number of free apps available for Maemo (and potentially a lot more that can be ported over from other Linux-based OS’es). Second, it’s fast.

The flip side of things is that software for the N900 is limited only to the creativity of individual developers – developers who have no monetary incentives, because there’s no real app store at the current moment. But that also means that you won’t find fifty different (useless) fart apps for Maemo.

Maemo 5 has a slight learning curve, although nowhere near as complex as I originally thought in my N900 first impressions post. Give the phone a couple of hours, and you’ll be swiping through desktop views and flying through menus. It will, however, take you considerably longer to figure out the more advanced features (repositories, debian packages, X terminal, etc) of the OS.

Multi-tasking is where the N900 truly shines. At any given time, I’ll have 6-10 applications open – browser windows, IM/SMS boxes, notes app, games, etc – and the N900 handles everything flawlessly. Switching between different applications is as simple as hitting the icon in the top left corner, and then tapping on one of the application (real-time) snapshots. It’s quick enough and intuitive enough that I find myself naturally swapping back and forth when I find myself waiting for a web site to load, or downloading an app. Man, I love it.

And now I’d like to talk about some noteworthy (not necessarily for the better) applications:

Email

I’d call the stock email client a mixed bag. While setting up accounts is easy as pie, grabbing emails from external accounts (Yahoo!, Gmail, etc) takes forever, and I still have never successfully managed to send any emails out – they remained stuck in the limbo known as the Outbox. Not really too robust.

I’d also like to see threaded emails a la Gmail.

Multiple Desktops

A little disappointing. Essentially, the multiple desktops/views feature allows you to put different shortcuts and widgets on each desktop, using finger swipes to navigate through each one. It’s like Mac OS X’s Spaces, but not as well-executed. Added shortcuts are missing text labels, icons do not snap to a grid (so lining up icons ends up being a bit of a chore for neat freaks), and there’s very few (useful) widgets. Case in point: the Google widget, which you’d assume to be a desktop search box, is actually just an oversized bookmark to Google Search.

Conversations

Finally, threaded SMS and integration with Google Talk and other “popular” chat platforms! I was a little surprised that AIM wasn’t included in the list, but you can add that and several other platforms like Twitter, ICQ (does anyone even use ICQ anymore?) and MSN with a small addon from the repository. Very well done overall.

Browser

For the most part, I like the N900 browser. It’s based on Mozilla, renders pages perfectly fine, and is fast enough. The only thing that really bothers me are input textboxes, which sometimes require multiple taps in different spots to get working. Oh yeah, and you also can’t uninstall Nokia’s useless “Single sign-on for Ovi by Nokia” browser add-on.

Call Quality

As well as can be expected. I had no real problems hearing or being heard. I do wish the loudspeaker was a bit louder, though.

Prospective N900 buyers may want to note that there’s a microphone issue with a select number of N900s which pretty much cuts off all microphone recording (phone, video recording, etc) – so make sure you test this out first thing.

Multimedia

I’m happy to report that the speakers on the N900 are decent. And by decent, I mean closer on the scale to Nokia’s XpressMusic series than the Nseries line.

I also like the onboard media player. It played several DiVX videos right out of the box which was a welcome surprise. And if the stock player doesn’t float your boat, several alternatives such as Mplayer (and the Kmplayer GUI addon) are available in the repositories.

Battery Life

It’s hard to do a good battery test, and the best that I can say is that I barely made it through a day of battery life with heavy usage. With typical normal usage, however, you should not have a problem with the phone lasting the entire day.

One caveat, however: I’m on EDGE, which drains less battery than 3G. If you’re a heavy 3G user, I’d be willing to bet you’ll need to carry around a USB cable or charger.

Final Thoughts

The N900 is an impressive, well-thought out phone aimed at the power user crowd. What’s sad is that, with a couple of minor changes to the operating system, Nokia could’ve had a serious consumer hit on their hands. Instead, the N900 is destined to play second banana to the iPhone and the slew of new Android phones. It’s really too bad – for the price (roughly around $500 USD), you get a powerful smartphone that’s not only capable of everything (minus the fart apps), it’s capable of doing everything at the same time with ease. Multi-tasking at its best.

Random pet peeve: Nokia put a new kind of stock display protector on the N900, one that completely obscures everything beneath it. So if you’re buying a N900, make sure you get a screen protector too. I recommend Brando’s Ultra-Clear line.

The S60 Fifth Edition Virtual Keyboard Shootout

ang — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:11:23 +0000

Pitting three virtual keyboards head-to-head. Who wins?

Last time I compared three physical keyboards. Now I’m going to attempt to tackle three different virtual keyboards – the stock Nokia one, DayHandInput, and SlideIt. While all three have their own unique advantages and quirks, sadly enough, the clear “winner” is a bit hazy. More inside.

Skip to the end to read the quick summary.

All tests were conducted with the 5530 XpressMusic phone.

The Problem With Nokia’s Virtual Keyboards

Nokia’s touch phones don’t support multi-touch. That’s one problem. A bigger problem, however, is the way that Nokia designs its virtual keyboards. I don’t mean looks, even though the 5530/5800XM keyboards seriously look like utter crap, but how the phone interprets a tap on a letter. On your PC’s physical keyboard, when you press a key, the letter or character that the key represents gets activated. The key fires when the button is pushed down, not when the key is let go. Unfortunately, Nokia hasn’t quite figured this one out yet.

In practical terms, this means that Nokia virtual keyboards will only spit out a letter once you let go of a button, never before. Say you’re typing the word pan. You hit the letter p with your right thumb, and the letter a with your left. Here’s the issue: if you hit the a too fast, or before lifting your finger from the p – the phone will completely ignore the p and just print out the a instead. Multi-touch would help the issue, but having the phone display the letter as soon as you touch it vs. touching it and letting go would be a huge, huge improvement.

And now let’s start the comparison:

DayHandInput, a virtual keyboard replacement.

The MrMilk/DayHandInput Modded Virtual Keyboard

A Chinese company created a replacement virtual keyboard for Chinese users, called DayHandInput. And then an enterprising user known as MrMilk took DayHandInput, added standard English letters/characters, and released it on some forums. What’s interesting about this modded keyboard is first – it looks super slick, and second – it supports a far, far larger number of possible characters thanks to a dragging system and multiple windows. Basically it works like this: The q key is assigned to both the q letter and the number 1. So you’d tap the q key to get the q, and tap/drag in any direction to get the 1. It works well, and even though it suffers from the same issue of only recognizing keys when the key is released, at least it’s not as embarassing to use.

It’s also customizable to a degree (since it’s a hack, there’s a lot of random Chinese stuff that appears as boxes in the options), but you can definitely change the keys and skin somewhat easily.

Good

- Looks better than the stock, and comes with different skins
- Several different keyboard types available, switch between them by either dragging or pressing a button
- Shaped more like a traditional keyboard than the stock
- Dragging system allows you to type multiple characters per key

Bad

- You have to tap one extra time before you can activate the keyboard
- In landscape mode, there’s a small gap between the text and the keyboard. When you’re writing a text message, the gap just happens to show part of the “Send Message” button, so I’ve actually typed part of a message with the keyboard, accidentally hit the Send key, and *bam* message sent. Dammit!
- Whoever customized the version I’m using mapped the secondary abc keyboard to activate when you hit the space bar and drag. So, of course, I do this by accident occasionally which is frustrating.

You can grab DayHandInput from here. More information about MrMilk’s modded version can be found here:

Hacked phone version
Dev. Cert. version, needs to be signed

IPMart forum thread

The SlideIt virtual keyboard.

SlideIt Virtual Keyboard

SlideIt is an innovative little virtual keyboard, which uses finger dragging from letter to letter, connect the dots style, to spell words. To type in a word, you press the first letter, drag your finger to the second, then the third, and so on. When you’ve finished, the interface will attempt to guess what word you just scratched out, and will present you with some other choices. It sounds silly, but it works. It just doesn’t work quickly.

Good

- Innovative key entry
- Text prediction is quite good
- Good for portrait mode users

Bad

- Easy to pick up but impossible to master
- Strictly a one-handed affair
- Slower text entry than the others
- A little laggy
- You can’t go back and edit a word – to do so, you have to delete and retype the entire word again
- Has trouble with large words and double letters – try typing in “craziness”

More information about SlideIt can be found at the official SlideIT site.

The stock 5530 Virtual Keyboard.

The Nokia 5530 XpressMusic Stock Virtual Keyboard

I really, really hate this keyboard. Yet I can’t deny that it’s the keypad with the least amount of issues.

Good

- Probably the most sensitive/fastest of the three keyboards
- Can highlight text while in keyboard mode

Bad

- Looks nasty
- Need several taps to get to the symbols menu

Quick Summary

It’s hard to say which of the three is really the winner here, even though the stock keyboard probably offers the best performance. DayHandInput isn’t too different from the stock, but my tendency to make more disastrous mistakes with it gave a slight edge to the standard Nokia keyboard. SlideIt, while something completely innovative, is just a tad too slow to be a serious contender unless you’re a one-handed, portrait mode typist.

Breaking: Nokia Closing Flagship Stores in USA

ang — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:06:07 +0000

Nokia's closing its two US Flagship stores.

Wow. That’s about all the words I have after learning that Nokia is planning to close its two retail stores in New York and Chicago.

While I’ve never been to the Chi-town location, the Flagship store on Fifth Ave. has been the site of many blogger meetups and events, as well as being an overall cool place to visit. It’s a shame to say the least.

The move comes on the heels of the company closing one of its two London store locations, and leaves Nokia with little more than an online web presence in the USA.

“Nokia said it would close the stores in New York and Chicago as part of its retail strategy revamp to better focus on co-operation with telecommunications operators and with retailers.”

Nokia To Close U.S.A. flagship stores – Reuters

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