Nokia N900 Gets Official: Is It a MID or a Smartphone?
Word about the next Nokia Internet Tablet has been bouncing around for a while. The rumors had the N900 firmly trying to straddle the smartphone/MID fence, with a full Maemo 5 implementation under the hood. The N900 is now official, with the company planning to show it at Nokia World next week. It is basically a modernized Internet Tablet with full 3G telephony thrown in for good measure. This puts it firmly in the smartphone camp, too.
The Maemo 5 operating system is a full Linux-based implementation that brings the MID experience to the N900. Nokia promises a Mozilla web browsing experience on the N900 that is outstanding, complete with Flash support. The 3.5-inch screen will display at a decent resolution of 800×480, and the sliding keyboard looks good. It also has a Carl Zeiss optics-powered 5 MP camera on board.
The Nokia N900 has all of the connectivity options covered, with Wi-Fi, TV-out, Bluetooth, FM transmitter, GPS and quad-band 3G. The 3G is complete with GSM/EDGE, 900/1700/2100MHz UMTS/HSPA covering all of the bases. The interesting thing about that 3G is the 1700 MHz band, which means the N900 can work on the T-Mobile USA network.
The ARM Cortex-A8 CPU will have 1 GB of application memory to work with, so the N900 should be no slouch in the performance department. All of this goodness should be heading to select markets in October for an unsubsidized price of 500 euros ($713). The N900 is definitely a MID, or is it a smartphone? It looks like both — which is likely Nokia’s intention.
http://www.youtube.com/v/RP5R-5NX1BE&hl=en&fs=1&
(via engadget)
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If it wasn’t for the weight (180 grams), it’d be firmly a smartphone – it has roughly the same dimensions as T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream, after all.
Why would anyone want to surf the internet on a 3.5″ screen?
I do all the time on my G1 :)
You must have better eyes than me! I surf the ‘Net sometimes with my Nokia N810 (4″) screen and after 2 hours that’s enough for me!
Sure, same thing with any smartphone for that matter: I own an N810 and iPod Touch. Isn’t the point mobile access when it would be inconvenient to lug around a laptop?
Correction to the article- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE at all of the normal bands, then Tri-band UMTS/HSDPA at 900/1700/2100 to play nice with T-Mobile USA and everywhere else in the world
Not Quad-band 3G
awesome.
this is probably something i am going to buy.
Does is guy have storage (like the N97)?
32GB and memory card expansion from what I’ve read.
there’s probably no difference between MID and smartphone anymore, or will not be very soon. this is the direction things were heading to anyway.
This WILL be my next phone…mid…media player…all in a very pocketable form factor.
Per my Nokia source, the N900 will not run on the 3G band on AT&T in the US, but just on EDGE. I thought the 3G bad for AT&T was the 2100, so now I am confused…
AT&T 3G is on 850/1900.
“MID” is a word Intel made up. Nobody uses it except tech writers. Just because this Nokia smartphone is huge and thick and ugly doesn’t mean it’s not a smartphone. It shouldn’t surprise you to see a smartphone accessing the Internet with a real operating system in 2009 when iPhones and iPods have been doing that for 2 years now.
The N900 sells in something called the smartphone market, where Nokia has over 50% market share. It’s a smartphone.