Wireless

Nokia wants you to chat up a storm with its new N900.

(Credit: Nokia)

With its new N900 handset, Nokia is playing up the Linux angle.

Part cell phone, part computer, the N900 takes advantage of Nokia's Linux-based Maemo operating system to offer multitasking, Web browsing, a touch screen, and slide-out keyboard.

Running the open-source Maemo 5 software, it can provide more of a PC-like experience on a small device, according to Nokia. The Maemo OS lets people juggle several applications at the same time.

"The Nokia N900 shows where we are going with Maemo, and we'll continue to work with the community to push the software forward," Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's executive vice president for markets, said in a statement. "What we have with Maemo is something that is fusing the power of the computer, the Internet and the mobile phone."

Nokia's Maemo OS is separate from the company's Symbian OS for smartphones, though the company has said it wants to make it easier for developers to write applications for both.

(Credit: Nokia)

The specs on the N900, announced Thursday, include an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 1GB of application memory, 32GB of storage (expandable to 48GB with a MicroSD card), and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Although Nokia dubs the device a tablet, it measures 4.4 inches by 2.4 inches and features a 3.5-inch widescreen display.

Equipped with a Mozilla browser and Adobe Flash 9.4 support, the device provides 10/2 High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) for mobile broadband speed, along with wireless LAN connectivity.

The handset also sports a 5-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens.

Nokia will offer the N900 in selected markets starting in October for 500 euros (around $712). The device will be on display at Nokia World in Germany next week.

The N900 is the next generation follow-on from Nokia's N800 and N810, which were released in 2007. The N800 sells for around $300, while the N810 goes for about $400.

The next version but one of Nokia's Maemo mobile Linux operating system will use Qt rather than GTK+ for its application development framework.

Basing Maemo Harmattan on Qt will make it easier for developers to write applications for both Maemo and Symbian, Nokia's smartphone platform, the Finnish company's development platform product manager Quim Gil said Saturday at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

Harmattan will be the successor to the upcoming Fremantle, which is also known as Maemo 5. (Nokia code-names its Maemo versions after the names of winds.)

Gil said that Qt, acquired in Nokia's purchase of Trolltech a year ago, will not come "out of the box" in Fremantle, but it will have community support. This will open Maemo up to developers who work with the KDE desktop environment, which uses Qt, he said. Maemo is currently based largely on Gnome, a rival environment, which uses GTK+.

"For Harmattan, we will make a switch," Gil said. "It's not an easy switch. If you look at the platform, the Fremantle middleware will stay more or less the same, but now Qt will come as officially supported."

The Gnome community is being invited to work with the Maemo community to get Gnome applications working on this new, Qt-based version, he added.

There is a "good push inside Nokia to bring Maemo further to mainstream audiences", Gil noted. However, he conceded that Maemo-based devices such as the N810 tablet are aimed at a small, high-end market, which is an unattractive scenario for many developers.

"There is an interesting possibility of getting a common API based on Qt for Maemo and Symbian," Gil said. "If you're developing for a platform like Maemo, which doesn't bring you millions of users, with that work you can then do a Symbian port and then have a much wider reach on Symbian devices, using the common Qt API," Gil said.

Nokia will continue to contribute to the Gnome project and provide support for GTK+ libraries, he added.

Meanwhile, on Monday Nokia denied speculation it was working on an Android device, a development that would have meant the company was supporting three open-source platforms.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Nokia has strongly denied working on an Android-based handset, following a report early on Monday that it's planning to do so.

The report, carried in The Guardian, took a cue from "industry insiders" to predict the launch of a touch-screen Android device at Nokia World in September. When contacted by ZDNet UK later Monday morning, a Nokia representative issued an "outright denial" of the piece.

"There is no truth to this story whatsoever," a statement from the company read. "It is a well-known fact that Symbian is our platform of choice for smartphones."

Going for Android would certainly have been a surprising move for Nokia, given the time and money it has put into opening up Symbian. Nokia's operating system (since it bought out Symbian's other stakeholders last year) is likely to reappear in its new, open-source guise next year.

Nokia also has another open-source mobile platform in Maemo, which it is actively promoting as part of its Intel partnership.

Meanwhile, fairly realistic-looking images have been leaked of Sony Ericsson's Android phone, currently code-named "Rachael." The device appears to be part of SE's high-end Xperia line and is said to run on Qualcomm's 1GHz Snapdragon processor.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

One element was striking in Tuesday's joint press release from Intel and Nokia: Symbian was not mentioned.

Symbian is the dominant operating system for smartphones with a 50 percent market share. Nokia has been using it for 10 years.

Instead, Nokia and Intel declared that they will "develop common technologies for use in the Moblin and Maemo platform projects."

Both are Linux-based platforms: Moblin is supported by Intel and Maemo is used by Nokia in its Internet Tablets such as N810 (the only modern touch-screen devices that Nokia made until it finally launched its touch-screen 5800 Xpress Music phone in October 2008).

Already in May, rumors had started that Nokia would ditch Symbian and go with Maemo in future smartphones.

The rumors were based on a several factors:

• Even though it is the dominant smartphone OS, Symbian is way behind Apple and iPhone in making users aware of applications. (Nokia acquired Symbian last year and transferred the code to the Symbian Foundation, which will transform it into open source.)

• Nokia has declared that the next generation of Maemo, Fremantle, or Maemo 5, will support 3G connectivity.

• In May, Intel and Nokia formed oFono, an open-source project for developing easy-to-use APIs for telephony applications, possibly to give Maemo voice and SMS capabilities.

• A future version of Maemo, Harmattan, allegedly will be put on at least one mobile phone, according to Mobile Crunch.

David Wood, the "futurist and catalyst" at the Symbian Foundation, responded to these rumors in a blog post last month. "To my mind, it makes perfect sense for phone companies to investigate at least two modern mobile operating systems," he wrote. "For example, Nokia is investigating Maemo (now coupled with oFono) in parallel to its main usage of the Symbian platform."

Clearly, Nokia and Intel have big plans for Linux-based devices. In Tuesday's statement they said they will "define a new mobile platform beyond today's smartphones, notebooks and netbooks."

It's also clear that from a hardware point of view, the two companies share many synergies. Apparently, Nokia intends to use Linux on jointly developed hardware, rather than Symbian.

This might be a future strategy to fight the strong competition coming from Apple and others in the smartphone market.

"I think Nokia might look at widening its Linux Maemo offering beyond its N800 family of products in order to differentiate itself in the high end", said Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at analyst firm Gartner.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Nokia will ditch Symbian altogether. More likely, Nokia will keep it in its lineup of midrange phones, as is actually the case today.

A glue holding the two systems together is the development environment Qt (pronounced "cute"), based on open-source code from Trolltech, a company that Nokia acquired in 2008. Qt will be used both in Symbian and Maemo and could offer a possibility for cross-developing applications.

One remaining question is whether the partnership with Intel can help Nokia match the huge advantage Apple has secured in applications awareness in consumers' minds.