New phone?

I’ve been thinking about getting a new phone once my current one’s been paid off… I’m on a Telia 18-month plan and it ends in about a month. I’m probably going to stay with Telia; I like their coverage… I was thinking of getting an iPhone, but like you’ve probably noticed, I’m not too happy with the Apple way of doing things. And they’re not very happy with me, either – they’re doing their absolute best to keep me using their hardware, while at the same time telling me, over and over again, that I can’t do the things I want to do. I’m a “power user”, and I’m tired of their condescending crap.

My solution: Looks like I’ll be getting a Nokia N900.

Why? Well… I haven’t been able to get my hands on the physical thing yet, but my research has came up with a few real big items on the “plus” side…

Maemo. It’s Linux, what more can I say? Nokia has seen the light and made a Debian-based operating system for mobile devices, and the N900 is the first of their smartphones to use it. Now we’re talking FREEDOM. Real freedom. As in, the ability to do whatever you damn well please. Disassemble, redesign, reassemble. I don’t need to get a Macintosh to develop software for it. Heck, I’m not even limited to just one programming language – there’s a Python port which, reportedly, works kind of well. Words can’t even express how excited I am about the possibilities of a Linux smartphone. A truly open platform…  It’s like they designed it with me in mind.

Root access, sftp/ssh… It’s just everything the iPhone isn’t structurally.

Multitasking. That’s right Apple, it’s important enough for me to list it separately from the OS… =)

Camera. Quite a good one, with good optics, as far as I can tell. 5 megapixels.

Flash. Yeah. Eat that, Apple.

Mozilla-based browser. See above.

TV-out. Awesome.

Resolution. 800×480, which is higher than the iPhone.

32 gb internal storage. Always nice.

QWERTY-keyboard. I still like physical keyboards.

There are others – like the GPS, for instance, but I wanted to list what made the N900 stand out, compared to other smartphones.

There are, of course, drawbacks.

Lack of apps. The iPhone / iPod Touch has lots and lots of ready-to-install apps – and a lot of them are pretty neat. There are, of course, an almost unlimited amount of Linux apps available, but there’ll probably be some problems getting them to work.

Kind of bulky. its 18mm thickness makes me remember my first phone, the one I got from my parents in 2000… But on the other hand, I prefer bulky to easy-to-drop-and-lose…

Nokia-only. In getting invested in Maemo, I’m getting invested in Nokia – which means, I’ll probably keep using Nokia phones in the future. Which is kind of OK, since I’ve been doing that for the past ten years anyway. And when Maemo and Moblin become MeeGo (funniest name this week, you know – Mi-Go), I’m guessing there’ll be others who’ll want to use it as well. I can only hope that MeeGo is backwards compatible with devices like the N900…

Risk of developer shutdown. Right now, Nokia has both the S60 and the Maemo OS going. I kind of like the idea of the S60, since it evolved from the OS of my favourite palmtop, the Psion. Only time will tell which way Nokia will go in the future. On the other hand, it’s Linux. If Nokia backs of, there’ll always be people that keep on working.

No multitouch. A bummer – I’ve really gotted accustomed to the two-fingered zoom of the iPod Touch, and I’ll miss it. Not a showstopper, more like a bump on the road…

So, it’ll probably happen. Right now, it seems like a match made in heaven…