Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Upcoming Nokia Products

RDA Phone ListThere seems to be a lot going on with Nokia this year in terms of new and upcoming products. One of the highlights this year has to be the launch of their N97 flagship. There has also been a slew of follow-up models to their 5800 XpressMusic phone. But there are bigger things to come, and the time is ripe enough that Nokia has started sharing on their various official websites.

There is going to be the Nokia N900 “mobile computer”. The product name kind of suggests it is like the N810 or N800 Internet Tablet which runs Maemo Linux.

But while the N800 and N810 are not phones (you can’t make phone calls), the N900 can make phone calls. It actually looks like the N97 too, and on top of that, has hardware specifications that very closely resembles the N97. The notable improvements of the N900 over the N97 include: faster processor (ARM Cortex A8 600MHz), 1GB of application memory (256MB physical RAM, 768MB virtual), 800×480 display, and cellular network data rates up to 10Mbps downlink and 2Mbps uplink.

It will be interesting to see how Nokia Maemo Linux phones stack up against Android phones. Maemo is a more complete Linux environment which might sound more interesting to developers (or at least Linux developers), but even with its top-notch hardware specifications, it might be difficult to port typical opensource applications to the platform. Things like user interface differences would likely force applications to be re-designed. That would negate at least some of the advantages of a familiar Linux development environment.

The next thing is that Nokia has stepped into the netbook market segment with the announcement of their Nokia Booklet 3G. It will have 3G, Wifi and GPS. Physically, it will have a 10″ screen, weight 1.25kg, and its batteries will run for 12 hours. An interesting thing is HDMI port for HD video out.

If you’re wondering what OS this netbook will run… not Symbian and not Maemo. It will be Windows. So the Booklet 3G will really compete head-on in the netbook space. I’m not so sure I would be happy with a Windows-based computer though.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

View Comment Policy