Buy Nokia N900 Unlocked Phone/Mobile Computer with 3.5-Inch Touchscreen, QWERTY, 5 MP Camera, Maemo Browser, 32 GB--U.S. Version with Full Warranty

Don't buy this device if you are looking for a convenient Personal Information Manager. The features of the calendar, contacts and phone manager are at least 5 years behind state of the art user interface.

Contacts:
1. All entries are in essentially one directory, making it difficult to use if you have hundreds of contacts.
Suggestions: Nokia should allow user defined contact groupings.

Calendar:
1. Repeating events are non-functional. There's no way to set up a repeating meeting on the 4th Saturday of every month for example. If you select a repeating monthly meeting on March 25th, it will occur every 25th. If March 25th was Friday, the next event will occur on April 25th which may be a Wednesday. Whoever wrote the specs for the calendar capability has never used a PIM before.
2. User interface is too slow. Too many screen touches are required just to enter the date and time. You must scroll for each date/time parameter. Month - scroll; Day - scroll; Year - scroll; Done: Now enter time: Hour - scroll; Minute - scroll; am/pm - scroll; Done. I'm already exhausted.
3. When scheduling a new event, there's no way to see which day of the week it will be on unless you peek at the calendar before starting to enter a new event.
Suggestions: My old Blackberry 8700c UI is much better for PIM use. Nokia should study it.

Phone Manager:
1. No call logs/ call timers / missed calls / No message waiting indicator.
2. UI layout poor. Reject and Answer touch areas are adjacent - easy to hit the wrong area by mistake.
3. UI too slow. Press answer - the screen takes at least a second or two to show that you are connected. Meanwhile if you believe you didn't hit answer, your keytouch may reject the call.
Suggestions: Change the layout and make it faster.

Buy this device if you want to have the latest Linux gadget. I have N900 root access, can ssh/sftp/scp to my N900 from my Ubuntu Latop. Very nice. I can VNC to my media server to set streaming video to my HDTV right from the N900. Cool. But, I can do that from my T61 as well with a much bigger screen. In a pinch, you can make the small screen work.

Skype phone calls - awesome. But, it should have Skype video capability. I suspect the front(user) facing camera quality is not good enough under indoor lighting conditions to be acceptable for most video calls.

GPS/OVI maps - give it up. Crude interface.

Summary: There are some very good innovative features on this device. However, if you are a heavy PIM user, this device will slow you down a lot. If you need to ssh into your server from anywhere in the world, this is the device for you.


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