Hands on: Nokia N900 review

The ARM processor allows you to have multiple browser windows open at once, and the N900 did well at displaying them all with minimal lag. The browser, built on Mozilla's desktop internet program apparently, is strong and, crucially, very fast over Wi-Fi. It will easily show full HTML.

It gives the feeling you're playing with a very powerful device indeed, and we're looking forward to really putting the N900 through its paces for a full review soon.

Nokia also has its own version of Apple's pinch and zoom technique for blowing up web pages - you use an interesting finger swirl to zoom in. It's a bit odd and doesn't always work (instead it just throws the web page around) but there's always the option to double tap instead.

The Maemo experience on the N900 is a lot better than that offered by Symbian, namely because it brings a greater amount of intuition to its use than the previous OS ever could. We're talking an 'alerts' panel which shows you things like Wi-Fi, GPS and battery life, all displayed in more detail.

There's now an 'X' in the corner of the windows to shut them down, rather than having to go through the palaver of pressing menu, scroll to exit and then go back to the homescreen each time.

It seems to be that the menu on the Nokia N900 is only accessible through the applications pane, which seems a bit weird as it adds another step for no reason, but we're either missing something or the idea is to customise the homescreen so well you never need the actual menu.

Messaging on the N900 is a decent experience as well, with the cramped keyboard not actually too bad for writing on in the end. Not only are messages arranged as conversations, but there's also a great amount of support in the box for IM, with Google Talk, Skype and Jabber all included.

Media on the Nokia N900 is also well catered for, with a cool graphical interface on top of the video player. Playback is superb and fast on the high resolution screen, and the stand is the right angle for watching your vids with minimal glare.

The music player seemed functional enough, although we had to whizz by it as we didn't have our earbuds to hand to see how good the output was. However, the large and expansive screen gave some large icons to hit when using the player, meaning it should be nice and easy to navigate, possibly even in the pocket.

But the cool thing about the N900 isn't what you can do on it necessarily, it's how you can do it. You don't need forward and back arrows, you simply touch an element off the screen to go back to the homescreen, which is much like a desktop experience.

We disagree with Nokia that this is more a mobile computer than a phone - it's a smartphone and a very good one at that. We're looking forward to seeing how well it performs in practice, but early indications show Nokia might have just brought out an OS to save its skin in the nick of time.

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