I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a Nokia N900 today for a little while. After the Wired Store NYC debacle I thought I owed it to you to at least do something techy cool.

So I cut my trip home short and went over to the Nokia New York Flagship store on E. 57th Street in search of a the elusive N900.

Turns out in a Nokia store, it isn’t so elusive.

Once inside the store it is the first phone that is on display. Right behind the N900 was the previous big dog, the N97 and the puppy, the N85.

I made my way to the back of the store near the cash wrap, grabbed a blue stool and squared myself up with one of the two N900’s available for customer hands on testing. Well, available for a blogger’s hands on testing, one could say.

The phone is much lighter than I expected it to be for its size. The phone is thicker than an iPhone but weighs nearly the same. It doesn’t feel cheap. I have to say, the Droid, feels kind of cheap compared to the Nokia smart phone.

Something that came as a surprise was how responsive the phone was to switching between applications. It was seamless. Which is a good thing because the phone has two levels of app nagivation – one for inside the application you are using and a root level.

Take for instance you are using the web browser and have a couple of sites open. The first click of the menu will display all of your open pages as thumbnails on one screen (take that iPhone weird tri-page display). A second click will take you back to the root menu system.

The root menu system of the Nokia N900 like most devices is prescribed by Nokia’s developers as what they deem to be the most important applications. However, you can modify this menu like you would on most other handsets. Say, you wanted to move the feed subscription app to the root because you’re an RSS nut – you could do that.

Browsing on the phone was a great experience. Pages loaded quickly on T-mobile and scrolling was a breeze. What did take me a second to get a handle on was the zooming in of the content. My first instinct was to put my iPhone knowledge in place and go multi-touch in an attempt to pinch release. That failed. The N900 reacts to the not so multi-touch double tap to zoom.

The QWERTY keyboard experience was better than I expected. I fired up the note taking application and tried my best to write up stuff that made me sound smart so that the next person to pick up the phone in the store would know that a genius had just been there. It’s like random phone note graffiti and a keyboard test all in one. Back to reality . . . the keyboard was very responsive and I was able to type reasonably fast. Much quicker than an iPhone or Droid with its off center keypad.

I don’t know what the battery life of this phone is like or whether T-mobile outside of the store location is as good as in it. But what I do know is that this phone, unlocked, wants to fill the smart phone void in my life.

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• Nokia N900 With Maemo Internet Browser Video Demo (mrgadget.com.au)
• Nokia N900 First Impressions are Surprising, Both Good and Bad (jkontherun.com)
• Nokia steps up attack on iPhone with free music mobile (telegraph.co.uk)
• Nokia N900 quick hands-on (engadget.com)

Nokia N900 Hands On is a post from: TechStartups.com

Maybe simply doing R&D but you need to be doing something about it now!

I just finished reading a great post by Jorge Escobar on JungleG, “Mobile is About to Explode, Is Your Startup Braced?”

He strikes some important chords with this post and asks how you will deal with handling more traffic, from more devices, on more platforms?

Last week I touched on this a bit but more from the perspective of making your blogging administration interface mobile and to think creatively about solutions to blog on the go.

I’ve included a quote from Jorge’s post by the CFO at Google that can stress the point that not only do you need to be mobile with your admin but your sites and applications need to be mobile ready,

On a quarter over quarter basis, mobile searches grew 30% on Google. It tells you something about the mobile space, the smartphones, and how they are transformative. They are basically transforming how people live on a mobile basis. If we move forward the adoption of these mobile phones by lowering the cost because it is open source, think of how many searches that will produce.

The mobile space is much larger globally than the traditionally connected world. So much so that mobile adoption is 10 to 1 over. That’s a pretty impressive difference when you consider the amount of focus that is paid to non-mobile application and web development.

I agree that Google’s offering, Android, as an open source platform will spurr the growth of low cost devices. But two great hurdles still exist in delivering an experience that users will adopt into into their everyday behaviors: the networks and form factors.

Network wise, the 4G’s are coming but are lagging behind and full rollouts don’t appear to be coming until 2012. Verizon will be joining Sprint with limited LTE coverage in 2010.

And as for form factors, well, walk into any carrier’s store and pick up any other handset than an iPhone and you will magically be transported back to 2007. The entire field of competitors are based on previous models, small screens, arcane platforms and graphics as good as Dig Dug.

I have high hopes that the Motorola Droid will become a competitor to the iPhone. Though, I did have high hopes for the Nokia N97. It’s a killer platform, great camera and QWERTY keyboard. But it is crippled by an underperforming processor and an even slower operating system. We’ll see what the Droid has to offer.

In the meantime, get to work on your mobile products . . . your competitors are.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Get Your Startup Mobile. Now. is a post from: TechStartups.com