Nokia N900 is a mobile Internet device and smart-phone, from Nokia based on the Memos platform, superseding the N810. It runs Memos 5 Linux as its default operating system and is the first Nokia device based upon the TI OMAP3 microprocessor with the ARM Cortex-A8 core. Unlike the Internet Tablets preceding it, the Nokia N900 is the first Memos device to include phone functionality. It functions as a 5 mega pixel camera, a portable media player, and a mobile Internet device with email and full web browsing. It was launched at Nokia World on September 2, 2009 and was released on November 11, 2009 in the United States and 9 European countries. The N900 was launched alongside Memos 5, giving the device an overall more touch-friendly interface than its predecessors and a customizable home screen which mixes application icons with shortcuts and widgets. Memos 5 supports Adobe Flash Player 9.4, and includes many applications designed specifically for the mobile platform such as a new touch-friendly media player.

Today, Nokia stands at a fascinating fork in the road. Let's consider the facts: first, and most unavoidably, the company is the largest manufacturer of cell-phones in the world by a truly sobering margin. At every end of the spectrum, in every market segment, Nokia is successfully pushing phones-from the highest of the high-end to the lowest of the low. The kind of stark dominance Nokia has built over its competition certainly isn't toppled overnight, but what might be the company's biggest asset has turned out to be its biggest problem, too. In the past eight years, Nokia's bread-and-butter smart-phone platform has gone from a pioneer, to a staple, to an industry senior citizen while upstarts like Google and Apple have come from practically zero to hijack much of the vast mindshare Espoo once enjoyed. Of course, mindshare doesn't pay the bills, but in a business dominated by fickle consumerism perhaps more than any other, mindshare foreshadows market share-it's a leading indicator. Put simply, there are too many bright minds with brilliant ideas trying to get a piece of the wireless pie for even a goliath like Nokia to rest on its laurels for years on end. Yet, until just very recently, it seemed content to do just that, slipping out incremental tweaks to S60 on refined hardware while half-heartedly throwing a bone to the "the future is touch!" crowd by introducing S60 5th Edition alongside forgettable devices like the 5800 Xpress-Music and Nokia N97. A victim of its own success, the company that had helped define the modern smart-phone seemed either unwilling or unable to redefine it.

Not all is lost, though. As S60 has continued to pay the bills and produce modern, lust-worthy devices like the Nokia E71 and E72, the open, Linux-based Memos project has quietly been incubating in the company's labs for over four years. What began as a geeky science experiment on the Nokia 770 tablet back in 2005 matured through several iterations -- even producing the first broadly-available MID-until it finally made the inevitable leap into smart-phone territory late last year with the announcement of the N900. On the surface, a migration to Memos seems to make sense for Nokia's long-term smart-phone strategy; after all, it years younger than S60 and its ancestry, it's visually attractive in all the ways S60 is not, and it was built with an open philosophy from the ground up, fostering a geeky, close-knit community of hackers and dives from day one. Thing is, Nokia's been absolutely emphatic with us-Memos’ intended for handheld computers with voice capability, while S60 continues to be the choice for purebred smart-phones. So, back to that fork in the road we'd mentioned. In one direction lies that current strategy Nokia is trumpeting-continue to refine S60 through future Sambaing revisions and keep pumping out pure-profit smart-phones in the low to midrange while sprinkling the upper end of the market with a Memos device here and there. In the long term, though, running two platforms threatens to dilute Nokia's resources, cloud its focus, and confuse consumers, which leads us to the other direction in the fork: break clean from Sambaing, develop Memos into a refined, powerhouse smart-phone platform, and push it throughout the range.

By appleplmltd