After a delay, the Nokia N900 smartphone, the company's first mobile phone to run a Linux operating system, is now shipping to the United States and several other countries. Nokia says it hopes that the N900 device will appeal to developers interested in creating applications for the Maemo operating system.
The Nokia
N900 smartphone, Nokia's first phone to use a Linux operating system, is
now shipping after a delay of several weeks, the handset maker officially
announced on Nov. 10.
For now, Nokia is shipping to North America,
including the United States,
as well as Europe, the Middle East
and Russia. At
this time, the Nokia N900 costs about $750 U.S. dollars. The high starting
price is similar to the $699 that Nokia initially charged for its N97
smartphone when it first began selling in June.
"As the N900 begins to appear on shelves around the globe it will be price-gunned
at around 500 Euros SIM-free, with plenty of
contract deals making it available at a reduced cost and in some cases
gratis," Nokia said.
The Nokia N900 runs the Maemo 5 open-source operating system. When Nokia
first announced the N900, the company pointed out that Maemo
is a complement to Symbian and not a replacement for that operating system.
Nokia
is pushing the N900 more to developers than business users or even
consumers. The goal is to get developers to develop third-party applications
for the device that utilize Maemo. Nokia then plans to make the applications
available through its Ovi store by the end of 2009.
The N900 is meant to offer a lot more computing power than the average
smartphone. For example, the N900 includes an ARM
Cortex-A8 processor running at 600MHz, along with 1GB of application memory and
an OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics accelerator. In addition, the N900 offers up to 32GB
of integrated storage and users can add 48GB more with a MicroSD card.