Nokia announces it’s first Linux Phone
Nokia, announced today the company’s first Linux based phone, the N900. While leaks and rumors of this product were being circulated from since a few months ago, the official unvieling seems to have most tech-bloggers, geeks and Linux enthusiasts highly impressed.
The phone is based on a Linux Mobile Software platform called Maemo. Maemo was one of the popular open source mobile software stacks covered in a previous article.
With Nokia embracing the newly released Maemo 5 Linux based mobile platform for one of it’s most expensive and highly awaited “iPhone killer” products, albiet the fact that thier own Symbian OS has also been a winner among mobile phone OSes, clearly indicates the dominance of Linux as the next generation platform for Mobile devices.Nokia has a great website for showing off N900 as well as Maemo’s prowess.
Nokia's Linux Phone -N900
The new device has quite a lot of impressive features like a powerful OMAP processor with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, 1 GB of Application RAM, widescreen touch display, QWERTY keyboard, 5 MP camera, GPS and Quad-band GSM, EDGE, GPRS and WCDMA support, on the hardware side.
On the software side Maemo 5 has a lot of amazing features like the Mozilla engine based browser, a complete suite of open source applications for Media playback , support for Adobe Flash 9.4, multiple desktops , Widgets and an Application manager. Another cool thing about Maemo 5 on the N900 is it’s support for multi-tasking which is sure to show an enhanced performance, possibly even better than the iPhone.
Introducing Maemo 5 from Maemo on Vimeo.
All in all, this one does seem likea device that could give others like the Android-based HTCs or Webkit based Palm Pre’s a good run for their money. However, literally speaking, currently speculated to be at a price range of $700, it is a bit pricey and by the time it is available in India, it will still be about the Rs.32,000/-plus category.
What are your views on N900 ? Will it be in competition against the iPhone ? Or will it dominate the Linux-based Mobile phone market only ?
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Related posts:
- Mobile Roundup: N900 Price Announced, Samsung CorbyTXT Launched in India
- Nokia’s N97 Does a Savior with Firmware Upgrade
- Nokia N97 : Mobile Phone + Web Tablet [Review]
- Nokia OVI – Nokia is now an “Internet services” company and no more a mobile manufacturer
- Nokia launches Navigator, GPS Enabled Phone – Where is OVI?
Awesome. Will probably hang/reboot lesser than your current phone does
I just hope so !
N97’s performance isn’t something to talk about..hope Nokia is learning from it’s mistakes.
Oh yes… and I think for smartphones, Nokia should stop using Symbian…. Else Nokia will lose out its majority share to Apple, HTC, Palm, etc.
Although I personally never liked the Symbian OS, Nokia has now made it Open Source too. That has made me change my views …. or atleast made me more apprehensive. You never know … if some smart developers out there build a great open Symbian platform
can’t say how it would stnd against the Google brand once the Big G starts promoting g-phone worldwide…:D
Multiple Desktops.
Full Root Access.
No Jailbreaking Necessary.
This just might push iPhone out of the list of contenders for my smartphone purchase. Now the fight is between Android and Maemo. And I win with either of the two.