Nokia N900 review: A new hope

Reasonable retail package

The Nokia N900 retail package contains everything you would expect but will hardly surprise you with any extra niceties. In the box we found the mandatory charger, along with an adapter which makes older Nokia chargers compatible with the N900. Both preceding standards utilized by Nokia can be converted to microUSB to use with your Nokia N900.

The box and its contents

There is also a TV-out cable inside the box and a microUSB cable. The one-piece headset won't let you replace the earphones and keep the remote. The last thing inside the Nokia N900 retail package is a cleaning cloth.

There is no spare stylus, nor a memory card, though the 32GB of onboard storage is more than welcome of course. You can safely do without a stylus for comfortably navigating your N900, so the lack of a spare unit isn't much of a problem either.

Nokia N900 360-degree spin

Standing at 110.9 x 59.8 x 18 mm, the Nokia N900 has a total volume of 113 cc. This is more than the already pretty chubby Nokia N97 and perhaps too much compared to the N97 mini. The neat and simple styling though makes sure the N900 doesn't look intimidating or difficult to handle.

The weight is the sky-high 181 grams, which makes the Nokia N900 the heaviest phone we have reviewed since the HTC TyTN II.

The Nokia N900 is the size of a Samsung B7610 OmniaPRO, but looks more to the point

If you are ready to admit that performance and functionality (the QWERTY keyboard mostly) come at a price, you'd be quite comfortable with the N900. After all, the size issues of the B7610 OmniaPRO and the HTC HD2 didn't make them any worse performers. And the N900 even compares favorably against them on some points. Just don't expect to simply slip the handset in your pocket and forget about it.

The N900 is more comfortable to hold up to your ear than the HTC HD2

Design and construction

A handset this size could've only done with pure minimalist styling and in fact we find the N900 quite likeable. The sleek plastic at the back and the glossy fro nt certainly combine nicely and the simplified design (a bit too conservative as it might be) is pretty much what we'd expect in a workhorse like the N900.

The Nokia E71 has certainly spoiled quite a lot of users by making a point that great business handsets don't necessarily have to be fat bricks. But we are talking a completely different class and form factor here.

The sleek glossy front does get messy with use - fingerprints and all - but the rest of the handset is completely immune to those. We are quite fond of the particular type of plastic Nokia used on the handset (and other recent Nseries devices too - N97, N97 mini, N86 8MP) and we are not too bitter about the N900 having no metal on its body.

Display: 3.5 inches of class

Nokia N900 packs a 3.5" resistive touchscreen of WVGA resolution (800 x 480 pixels). In fact this is the first wide VGA display ever produced by the Finnish company.

The Nokia N900 packs an impressive display indeed

Quite as expected, a Nokia-made display with those specs delivers great image quality. Great contrast and vibrancy, even not so impressive images spring to life on the N900 screen. The sunlight legibility is splendid, coming close to the best in class.

Our only grudge with the N900 display is the brightness, which isn't quite as good as we are used to seeing from Nokia.

The sensitivity of the touchscreen is more than decent, but we've seen a few resistive units do even better. The N900 needs a slight push (rather than just a touch) for a tap to be registered but that's to be expected with resistive technology. There are still some exceptions where you can hardly find a difference at all.

To put it all in context, the Nokia N900 is better than the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic in terms of screen sensitivity and on par with the Nokia N97.