You probably would have heard and or read about Global Warming and its scary after-effects, Climate Change being the most prominent one. Unless you spend the last couple of years hiding under a rock, you would have also heard of ex US Vice-President Al-Gore’s documentary on this burning topic- “An Inconvenient Truth”.  That should give you a crash-course on global warming and carbon emissions and the like. Well, now you must be asking me, “Whats this gotta do with my N900?” Well, let me tell you as a N900er you can do your bit to offset your CO2 emissions. Lets start by hitting on that read button for now.

I have tried to be as elucidate as possible with the screenshots and by now you should have a fair idea on what this app does. Let me summarise, just in case you didn’t make head and tail from the above screenshots. What WeOffset does is it calculates tonnes of CO2 emissions that we would lead to whenever we hop from one part of the world to other. Heck, even the soon to be held UN meeting on Climate Change in Copenhagen is bound to generate thousands of tonnes of CO2 but lets not talk about it here. Basically, what Nokia is trying to do is after calculating tonnes of CO2 emissions we generate cause of our air-travel, it urges you to make a suitable donation which it will forward to Climate Care, an organisation which funds projects on renewable energy and energy efficiency around the world. Isn’t that a novel idea? Hats off to Nokia for taking such an initiative. I just hope this app lands up on some of the most popular handsets today. Also, it would help if they can calculate and display the amount in local currency of the user.

I just made my donation to offset the emissions I account for, courtesy- my travel plans for the holiday season. Have You?

Coming to N900, I was delighted to see how easy it was to configure a N900 email account on Maemo 5’s default email client. Very much like the email setup on iPhone, you don’t have to bother about SMTP/POP server names if you are syncing one of the popular email services like that of Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Ovi mail etc. Infact its so simple, I wish my outlook functioned in a similar fashion. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the screenshots that I took as I configured the ovi mail account, after the break though.

Well, thats pretty much it, the whole process shouldnt take more than 2-3 minutes to complete the entire setup. However, if you have like a thousand messages in your inbox, give it sometime to download the messages. Yeah, I know, you would ask, you can configure multiple accounts as seen in the last screenshot where you can see that I have configured both Gmail and Ovi mailboxes. Used to my iPhone, I find the QWERTY keyboard a delight to use especially when composing the messages as I can now see the entire screen real estate as I key in furiously from the keyboard. iPhone didn’t give me that luxury owing to its on-screen keyboard hogging half the screen. Now, if you are someone who needs to compose a lot of emails, I can assure you that N900’s QWERTY keyboard will appeal to you big time along with full view of the gorgeous screen.

I was using Ovi Maps on N900 for routing today and was largely impressed by the app. The GPS lock-on was fast, and so was routing. The all new “Track Me” feature is what appeals to me the most. It auto-rotates the map and makes sure that you are reading the map in the correct direction. However, with no onboard digital compass, the task of orienting maps is based largely on your movement. If you happen to come to a halt, be it for a traffic signal or for refuelling your automobile, the map gets disoriented (Check out the Ovimaps-9 screenshot for traffic signal scenario) but it will auto-rotate and set in the right direction once you start moving. Overall it accounts for a decent navigation experience though.

We did see some blood on the battle field yesterday  and am now pitching them in a YouTube  round to find out which browser packs the  strongest punch. Which browser would you bet on? Safari? Maemo? Android?. I am afraid you will have to hit on the read button to see if you got it right?

YouTube Performance Test

Adobe’s Flash needs no introduction to anyone who spends a decent amount of time on the web these days. However, this very flash support is absent on some of the most popular mobile browsers today: Safari, Opera Mini, Android to name a few. However, HTC has its version of flash compatible browser in its Hero and N900 as we know comes with full flash support (by full flash support we mean the same version of flash that we use on our desktops). Now that we have ironed out the basics of browser capabilities, let’s see how they perform in our test

Round 1: iPhone- YouTube app, G1-YouTube app, Hero-Mobile version of YouTube, N900-Desktop version of YouTube.

Ew, this is something I didn’t expect from the N900 browser, especially after acing the speedtest yesterday. On a second thought, I should highlight that YouTube apps on iPhone and G1 are not browsers, so strictly speaking I shouldn’t comparing them with Hero and N900. Now, coming to Hero it no doubt performs better than N900 for the maemo browser has to load the desktop version of YouTube while the Hero is loading the lighter (data consumption wise) mobile version.

Round 2: iPhone- YouTube app, G1-YouTube app, Hero-Mobile version of YouTube, N900-Mobile version of YouTube

To zero in on a winner, I will now compare YouTube streaming speed for the mobile version of YouTube on both Hero and N900. iPhone and G1’s YouTube apps are also included in the test just for a comparison but it is not really fair to compare them with the browsers.

What was that? The N900 was nowhere in the picture when the Hero started streaming! Also, the resolution of the video on Hero was much better than that on the N900. Seems like Google have optimized their android browser to get the best out of YouTube. Even the YouTube app on G1 fares better than the one on iPhone.

So, who really takes the honours here? Based on the tests that I carried out, I will have to say the winner is HTC flash enabled browser of the Hero. It supports flash (mobile version) and it loads webpages and flash content faster than the maemo browser. What does this say about N900 browser? It’s not really as bad as the tests I performed might suggest for the maemo browser is loaded with full flash, which may take a while to load but it lets you do everything that you can do on a desktop browser (well, almost). So what should you go for? Well, depends on your usage, if you are someone who just likes to read content from the web on their mobile phones, I would suggest the HTC Hero but if you are a heavy internet user, you should go for the N900 for it will allow you to do everything that you can do on your desktop browser. Be it blogging, or playing Farm Frenzy on facebook, the N900 browser lets you do everything you want to but its just not optimized for mobile usage yet but give it sometime and am sure the updates will make it a much faster browser than what it is today.

To zero in on a winner, I put them through several tests and threw in HTC Hero, which according to me is the best Android phone in market (as of now) and HTC G1, the legendary Google phone which gave the world the first feel of Android. Eager to know who is the winner? Hit on the read button to find out.

Speedtest

Well I first started with the Speedtest on the devices using the services of speedtest.net as the benchmark. The service guages your net connection and summarises the upload and download speeds accessible from your devices. This is rather a hardware test than the browser but its the combination of both which matters when you are browsing and that’s why this test was the first on my list. Let’s see how our smartphones fare in this litmus test.

Needless to say N900 wins by a handsome margin over G1 and Hero and by rather a slim margin over the iPhone. Please note that this test reflects better Wi-Fi radio reception rather than browser speeds.

Webpage Test

Ok, we know that the N900 has an edge in the Wi-Fi reception, lets now see how it fares in load times of an actual webpage and whats better than our very blog, which has a fair amount of Flash content, along with images and other data intensive scripts.

While we saw that the G1 was the first to finish loading the page, we should note that it’s browser doesn’t support flash and as a result, it may have suceeded in loading the blog page faster than the other browser. The same goes with Safari on iPhone. But, between Hero and N900, it can be seen that the Hero loaded the blog page marginally faster than N900.

It’s rather too early to declare a winner here for I have carried out a few more tests. Apparently, YouTube doesn’t work as fast as I do and its taking me ages to upload those videos. So, stay tuned for more tests and conclusion of the battle of the browsers.

P.S- The tests couldn’t have been carried out without the assistance of my friends-ARD, Deeps and Horizon guy. Thanks a ton guys.

In case you are shifting across platforms, for someone like me shifting from iPhone to N900, there is no easy way out and just when I was running out of ideas, I stumbled upon this tiny little app called Hermes available for free from the Download section of the app manager.

What Hermes does is it synchronises your contacts with saved contacts from user’s twitter and facebook accounts. This may sound too simple but the practicality of this app is just amazing. Imagine getting all the contact info, including the date of birth, web page, addresss etc at just one go, thats it! Hermes is all that and more. Take a look at the demo video here to know what to expect from the powerful contact sync tool.

I was rather fortunate to unearth this video from the web for Nokia Conversations had just demoed the video in continuation of their ongoing Explore N900 under 30 seconds campaign. I was about to write at lengths explaining the methodology of the syncing the contacts, but the YouTube clip above makes it more lucid than I can ever get with my text instructions. So I will let the video do all the explanation, while I set back and give my verdict on the app.

I gotta give Hermes a special mention in our list of must have applications as this app is one of the most innovative apps, I have seen on the Maemo 5 till now. If you have like 300 friends, you should definitely not miss this app.

Hermes can be downloaded for free from the Downloads section of the app manager.

Having played around with Nokia 5800, N97 and iPhone, I have gotta say, image sharing has never been as easy and intuitive as on the N900.  Hit on the jump button to see what makes me say so.

Can it get any simpler than that? Infact I find this image sharing so intuitive and easy to use that I have never used either the bluetooth connection or the data cable to manually transfer any of the photos or screenshots that I keep uploading in this blog here. Incase you have noticed, most of the screenshots I have embedded in this blog are softcoded to my Flickr account, to which I directly uploaded from N900. This saves me a lot of time in copying and pre-processing the photos, that I had to previously in absence of a decent sharing service. I totally dig the multiple sharing and sort by tags for uploading my photos.

Once you get your N900, you should definitely try its sharing services, which by default includes Flickr and Ovi. Further the Pixelpipe plugin, along with Facebook and Evernote apps only enhance the usability of this service. So make sure you give this sharing feature a spin on your N900, as soon as you get one and I promise you that you will just love it and you might as well forget PC Suite or the Ovi Suite for all your image sharing needs.

Ever since I got my hands on the N900, I was wondering if I could get something similar working on one of its homescreen for this comes in very handy especially for a people like me who have to often work outdoors and at very short notices. Now I know exactly what gear to chose before setting my foot out of my residence. Thanks to Foreca, an amazing weather forecast widget for N900s.

Screenshots-

The widget is very easy to customize and one of the most intuitive apps that I have seen so far on the Maemo platform. Ofcourse there are not many apps yet but getting this app/widget working is a no-brainer. While one can find some of the most popular cities in the side panel, the app description says it can relay live weather forecast for as many as 140,000 locations across the globe. Further, the info displayed on the widget is soft coded, meaning clicking on the widget, will take you to the Foreca webpage for finer details related to the forecast.

As you know when it comes to weather forecasts, the info is only as useful as the units that they are displayed in and in this app, you can chose the system of units of your choice, so that you don’t have to pull out your hair trying to figure out the temperature in the unit systems of your choice after a glance at the N900 Foreca homescreen.

The bottom line is this is one handy app and a must have on your N900, if you already have one and mark this app in your “must have” list, if you still haven’t got your hands on a N900 yet.

I threw at N900, some of the most popular media file formats and each time it amazed me with the video and audio quality that was rendered from the onboard media player. I didn’t any of the files whatsoever either to set the resolution right or fiddle with the file formats. What all formats do you think you can dig with the N900? Hit the jump button to find out.

The first time I saw the UI of media player, I just fell in love with it. It looks like some console of a high end music system and make no mistake the onboard stereo speakers pack quiet a punch and you can use N900 as your portable media player, as long as you keep a spare battery in hand for the speakers really drain out the juice out of the device at an alarming rate. Anyway coming back to my point, did you guys know that N900 is DivX ready? Apparently the device is and Nokia have so far not highlighted this fact in any of their N900 promos and hence I was taken by a surprise when N900 played both .avi and .divx files with absolutely no lag or loss in quality and that is when both the files were in resolution of 624 x 352px.

This is what I totally love the N900 for. I have like a TB of video content all in either DivX or avi formats and now I don’t have to bother about converting them to some unheard of resolution or format to port them to my handphone. Apart from the frustration of going through the conversion, am gonna save not hours but days of computation time that the conversion would take considering the size of my video collection.

Now that’s one more reason why N900 is not a smartphone but a mobile computer. Beat that competition!

P.S- N900 doesn’t play.wmv files but am not complaining for the format never really took off the way Microsoft wanted it to and its nowhere close to the popularity of avi and divx formats.

Not to mention the canceling of pre-0rders from Amazon, Dell, NewEgg and other online dealers, N900 enthusiasts are just losing their patience and I got some first hand experience of the same when I was mobbed this weekend, after being spotted with N900. However, I put up a brave fight and managed to keep the N900 with me but only after letting my attackers have some hands-on feel of the device. Yeah, I was just kidding about being mugged, my attackers just wanted some first hand experience of the device. I was traveling on work over the weekend and hence was not able to update the blog here. Anyway having missed out on the black Friday, I realised that a lot of N900 buzz has been doing the rounds, which by now you should have already read. So, I thought I will cover something which no other N900 blog has touched upon so far- Data backup and Recovery on N900.

Unlike anyother smartphone, N900 is capable of managing its own recovery system, meaning you don’t have to connect to a PC/Mac to create/load your backups. If you ask me, this is one of the coolest features of the N900. Many a times you play around with your phone only to realise that you messed up with some setting and are not able to fix it. This is where you would start hunting for a backup image on your PC/Mac if it were anyother smartphone. Not with N900 though, you can create and restore a backup right from the device itself. Creating a backup takes around 3-4 minutes, depending on your contacts and other data (like calendar entries, bookmarks etc) you select to backup. Restore is pretty swift as well. So make sure you create a backup of your N900, once you have loaded all your contacts and other relevant data.

This is just another reason why the N900 is not just a smartphone but a computer in your hands.

If you happen to have a N900 at your disposal, head to menu->More-> Backup for creating/restoring N900 backups