It's turning out to be a busy week for Nokia. Days in advance of NokiaWorld in Stuttgart, and a couple of days after lifting the curtain on its first netbook, Nokia has announced the Nokia N900, the successor to its almost four-year-old lineup of Internet Tablets.
The N900 follows in the footsteps of the N810 with its slide out keyboard, but adds for the first time built-in 3G (Nokia calls it 3.5G) functionality, making the N900 the first Nokia tablet with the ability to go online without a WiFi connection or cellphone pairing. It's also the first Nokia device to run Maemo 5, Nokia's homegrown Linux distro.
As one might expect, Nokia has also upgraded the hardware inside the N900. It's now powered by a 600MHz ARM-based OMAP processor (compared to the N810's 400MHz CPU), supports OpenGL 3D graphics acceleration, and has 32GB of internal storage (expandable to 48GB via a microSD card). Like the N810 (and N800 with a Bluetooth add-on), the N900 also functions as a GPS. Nokia has also upped the ante on the camera with a 5-megapixel sensor and dual LED flash. Nokia has kept the 800x480 pixel resolution but has shrunk the touch-sensitive display from 4.13" to 3.5", making it one of the highest-resolution handhelds available.
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Nokia has changed the branding on the N900, dropping the "Internet Tablet" identifier that has been present since the launch of the 770 in December 2005. The Finnish hardware giant is instead touting the N900 as an evolution from the "previous generation" of tablet devices. From the looks of it, the N900 falls squarely into the Mobile Internet Device (MID) category, but the device's quadband EDGE/WCDMA/GPRS radio means that it should be able to function on most cellular networks as a vanilla cellphone, as the Nokia product shot at right shows.
On the software front, the N900 ships with built-in Flash support (take that, Apple), its own Mozilla-based Maemo Browser, as well as the usual contacts, e-mail, calendar, and media player apps seen on earlier versions. It can handle all the popular audio and video formats, too (with the obvious exception of DRMed iTunes content).
When the first Internet Tablet hit the market in December 2005, it was a revelation with its built-in WiFi, Linux OS, full-featured Opera browser, and 4.2" 800x480 touchscreen display. Each succeeding iteration of the Internet Tablet family has been a significant upgrade from the previous model, but the competitive landscape has changed even faster. The N900 is an impressive-looking piece of hardware, but it finds itself swimming in a sea of iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Android devices (and maybe, someday, some Atom-powered mobile Internet devices). With the announcement of the N900 and the Nokia Booklet 3G (rumored to be priced in the $800 range), Nokia has shown that it is interested in being a part of the MID and netbook conversations.
The N900 will carry a retail price of €500 before subsidies and will launch in "select markets" in October. No word on US pricing or availability yet.
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