Nokia N900 to be locked to Vodafone network.

It looks like all the previous vendors (eXpansys, Amazon UK and other suppliers) of the Unlocked Nokia N900 have been consistently denied product to sell by Nokia. Now the word is, that the N900 will be exclusively the product of The Carphone Warehouse (with a Vodafone ontract) and Vodafone UK.

This means only one thing, there will be NO SIM Unlocked Nokia N900’s. They will all be locked to Vodafone SIMs and further OTA updates will be to Vodafone specifications. With the advent of Vodafone 360 they will be more and more tied to this service. You really can reach no other conclusion, so much for Nokia’s commitment to Open Source and Open Source developers.

Amazon Looses a customer, Nokia N900 a Failure.

Well after all the lame excuses for a release that Nokia has be performing with the N900 it’s should come as no surprise that I was notified that it has been delayed again. This time Amazon is not expecting to receive any product until after the 25 of December.

How lame can Nokia be? If anyone doesn’t believe that the Nokia N900 is a fake product only has to count the numbers of real handsets shipped. It should tally under 1000, a typical prototype batch run. What has been being publicized, have been those chosen few who have been shipped a ‘demo’ unit, or a few select squeaky wheels on the Internet that needed to broadcast the N900 greatness.

Guess what, I’m not one of them.

So just as a suggestion, if anyone actually HAS a real, purchased Nokia N900, would tell me where and from whom.

Fundamentally, if anyone wants to know why Nokia is failing in the Smartphone arena, they only need to look to the N900 release, or rather the failure to release of a real product.

The Nokia N900 is a Fake

From the email this morning…


We regret to inform you that the following items have been delayed as we are still awaiting stock from our suppliers :

“Nokia N900 Mobile Computer with Maemo 5 Software”
Estimated arrival date: December 17 2009

One of Amazon’s aims is to provide a convenient and efficient service; in this case, we have fallen short. Please accept our sincere apologies.

I order this on the

2nd of Oct 2009

and this is the third delay. Could Nokia get the release of this phone more wrong? No! they have nothing to release, it’s a fake, vaporware! There are stories out there of Nokia shipping empty boxes to keep up the illusion. I’t no wonder that the boxes themselves look so cheap, they are cheap mockups.

Time to look for another REAL smartphone.

UPDATE: It REALLY is a fake I just received this email from Amazon on Sunday the 13th;

We regret to inform you that your order will take longer to fulfill than originally estimated. Our supplier has notified us that there is a delay obtaining stock for the following items you ordered on October 02 2009.

And the Amazon web page now states that the ‘Product’ is “Currently unavailable.
We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock”

The Nokia N900 Carl Zeiss optics

From the photos being posted on the Flickr N900 Pool I have been observing that the Carl Zeiss optics (Tessar) installed in the N900 is exhibiting, particularly in Macro or near macro focus mode, a classic shallow depth of field focus typical of a small f-Stop.

The N900 specs indicate that the Lens has an F-Stop of 2.8 and a Focal length of 5.2 mm, which for such a small sensor is good. But a real camera it’s not, from all it’s behavior, it looks like the F-Stop is fixed wide open which make any control over the depth-of-field meaningless. The lens does exhibit classic Carl Zeiss high contrast, which results in a very sharp photo. but there appears to be no real ‘shutter’ either. Motion effects behave more like video scanning where all sensor elements are NOT sampled at the same time like a real shutter would produce.

Over all the ‘Camera’ in the N900 could best be qualified as a very high end WebCam.

With regard to the sensor itself it appears to be relatively low in ‘noise’, probably more due to the restricted ISO controls than to the sensor. However one thing that I’ve noted is some jpeg artifacts that could probably use a little refinement in a firmware update. And guess what? no ‘raw’ mode from the camera, unless someone in the Maemo community wants to add this feature.

Still, I wish I had my pre-ordered N900 now … I could have posted my own photos. 🙂

The Nokia N900 in Portrait mode

One thing about the Nokia N900 (Maemo) system has always bother me. And that was it’s dependance on operations in Landscape mode, usually with the hardware keyboard extended.

Often I have heard other potential buyers put this restriction as a deal breaker. And while the Phone DOES operate in Portrait mode (in fact it switches to the Phone application when in Portrait mode) it could not operate the other applications in Portrait mode. This issue was also due to the lack of a Portrait virtual keyboard. Most of the complaints I heard were that people would use one handed operations while the phone was in Portrait, and that the N900 was flawed if it could not.

Now, watch some YouTube videos some time, if you watch other phones in operation, particularly when using their virtual Portrait keyboards, it’s never one handed. Almost without exception, the user brings both hands into play holding the phone with both hands. This more or less renders the argument moot if the user always uses both hands. The N900 in Landscape would be equally operated with both hands, and in fact be easier to use with either the larger virtual keyboard, or the hardware keyboard.

Problem, and flaw, resolved. By human behavior.

An Idiot talks about the Nokia N900

While most of what this guy said is short sighted and generally idiotic it did touch on something I agree with


But the fact is that by the time the M900 hits store shelves, it will be competing with not only Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Pre and Research in Motion’s second take at the Storm, but the first of what figure to be many Droid phones, all of which have serious brand recognition in the United States. By the time Nokia gets around to reintroducing the N900 — this time with pricing and a carrier — all the oxygen will have been sucked out of the market by the likes of Motorola, HTC and LG, running on Google’s Android.

Nokia, NO MORE DELAYS!!!

More Nokia N900 Slippage, Shit!

I’m saddened and disappointed to report that Amazon has reported another Nokia N900 shipping delay.

“Nokia N900 Mobile Computer with Maemo 5 Software”
Estimated arrival date: December 03 2009 – December 09 2009

That places the Nokia N900 dangerously close to a Vaporware classification. And moves the Nokia release date to the very end of November, rather than the early or middle of the month as was hoped. This is a bad move, one that put’s it’s release AFTER the Motorola Droid and all the other Android handsets. It makes the Nokia an Also Ran handset Maker, a Me Too! in a marketplace soon to have a large number of failed and marginalized handsets.

Another Reason to Love Nokia and Maemo

It’s not Google and it’s Deadly Power of Data I have always been leery of Power. I don’t buy Microsoft , and I’ve stopped playing into Apple fandom. The last computer I bought was a home-brew DIY Server built from parts I chose, powered by OpenSolaris So now it’s another validation of my still unshipped Nokia N900 and Maemo! Please let Amazon ship it soon 🙂

Vaporware label only requires 3 delays.

I’m hoping that the Nokia N900 doesn’t become Vaporware as it has now delayed, or at lease allowed the perceived ship date to slip twice now, from October 2009, to End of October to now ‘November’. If there is a third slippage, it begins to make the N900 the subject of Vaporware rumors, and that kind of talk is death to a new product.

Smartphones, thick as Flies!

Well if anything, you can’t say there there are too few choices in the Smartphone arena. Joining in the iPhone , Rim, Palm Pre , Windows Mobile firefight, there are now Maemo and LiMo. The later two (Maemo and LoMo) are entering the market just as there is an Android explosion of new phones. And while the Android phones are very tempting my requirements still point me at the Nokia N900, and I think that unless the Vodafone M1/H1 360 doesn’t get traction early, LiMo will be an early dropout.

NOTE: as predicted Vodafone 360 – An Absolute Failure?

Nokia N900 slips shipping date.

I looks like I’ll have to wait a bit longer for my Nokia N900, the ‘supplier’ has slipped the ship date from Oct 26th to Nov 5. I’m already anxious with anticipation, now I’ll have to take extra blood pressure pills to last out extra 10 days. The only consolation is if they manage to remove more bugs, add more software, and maybe throw in portrait mode operations 🙂