Nokia's Maemo 5 RX-51 / N900 tablet gets exhaustively previewed
By Nilay Patel 
posted Aug 19th 2009 3:04PM
posted Aug 19th 2009 3:04PM
posted Aug 19th 2009 3:04PM
The percentage of returned gadgets that have nothing wrong with them.
Of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were actually broken, according to a 2008 study.
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The Hacker Phone! Great Nokia!
I was waiting for the omnia pro, but I think this will be my next phone, providing there isn't anything horribly wrong with it on release. It seems to have similar features to the tp2/omnia pro except with a better cpu, massive internal memory, and most importantly a linux OS, meaning it will be hackable. Also it runs the same processor and operating system as the Pandora, which hopefully should mean lots and lots of games (admittedly with worse controls).
How can you be disappointed with Rover's resistive touchscreen, you havent tried it yet?
Must admit i was hoping for a capacitive screen at first but now im glad its reflective-resistive. Better vision in sunlight and inking and as proven by Samsung, resistive can be very responsive.
The UI looks pretty sweet.
i decided to skip the n97 since it seemed like nothing more than a wayyy more expensive 5800 (which i already have) but with a keyboard and few other improvements. then i saw the bl-40 and was finally considering jumping ship from nokia. the lg videos made the interface look amazing, but yesterday's hands on video revealed an extremely ugly interface and terrible lag times. the bl-40 couldn't even play a video decently without skipping throughout the entire clip. but thanks to this preview i now have something to look forward to once more. im going to wait and give nokia one more chance, because this interface actually looks pretty decent. it now seems to me that nokia was already working on this, and only created 5th edition to sort of mimic maemo so that they had a few products to release until this was ready. this just better actually come out this year and with att 3g available, otherwise im so over nokia.
as far as the pictures shown, theres like a billion of them yet not a single one of how the sms, im, or email inboxes look with messages in them. i noticed there was a "conversations" window, so i can only hope that ties sms and ims together in one window with threaded conversations. nokia seems last to the party on threaded convos, which is pathetic since they are the number one manufacturer. with the huge market share they have and want to hold on to, it never has made sense to me why they dont reinvest some of that money into hiring more programmers to improve their software. can someone confirm/deny/give a rumor/anything/lol on whether or not this device has threaded sms?
Does the BL-40 come standard with the ruler markings on it too?
So this continues in the design footsteps of the N86 and N97. Looks good, but I find it oddly interesting that even when Nokia has the room available for a standard 4 row keyboard, they choose to do a 3 row. If I had to guess, I'd say that the 4 row setup for whatever reason is going to be strictly an Eseries keyboard. Now onto the more pressing issue here. I'm probably part of a very small number of people who are going to miss S60. While Maemo 5 looks much like S60 5th in terms of visuals, its setup is better in most regards, but the homescreen is a total mess now and they've made the applications folder a complete disaster. There is no organization in either of those two. The homescreen looks like Samsungs widget screen, where things just lie around in no organized fashion, which I absolutely can't stand, and there are were no subfolders from what I could tell in the Applications folder to organize it better, so its not one giant moshpit of applications like on the iPhone. I just hope to God that if this is the way they're going, that they at least offer some homescreen organization and widgets like on the N97 (Accuweather, Email, FB) where you can actually see some information without having to go into the application. I'm going to assume that since this isn't iPhone OS, you can actually create folders yourself and organize things a little better than what is shown here. If Nokia doesn't want to do it, then I hope they at least allow me the opportunity to do so. Not a bad OS, but disappointing in some regards as it is now.
And why can't they stop putting stylus's in the phones, and just do what they did with the N97 and give you one you can attach via a lanyard? It's a total waste of space that they can utilitze for a bigger battery.
This most probably is going to work on Tmobile 3g bands.
Well, if Diablo was any indicator, Maemo 5 should offer near-desktop levels of customization. That should be really kewl.
I'm also looking forward to hearing Josh bemoan the resistive touchscreen on the podcast...what will be funny is that it may actually be a pretty good screen in spite of all that. I think that inconsistent UI design ends up being the downfall of a screen type more than anything else. There have been plenty of good resistive ones and crap capacitive ones just due to crappy software.