Nokia Launches Critical N900 Phone

When thousands of suppliers, developers, and analysts converged on Stuttgart in September to attend Nokia World, the Finnish company's annual in-house trade fair, the buzz was all about the new Booklet 3G netbook—Nokia's first foray into the hot category of pint-sized PCs. But away from the show floor, some Nokia execs had a surprising take: An even more crucial upcoming product, they said privately, was the company's new N900 handset and its computer-like operating system, called Maemo.

On Nov. 10, Nokia (NOK) finally began shipping the N900 after a two-month delay. Though no larger than an Apple (AAPL) iPhone or other Internet-friendly handsets from the likes of Research In Motion (RIMM) or HTC, the N900 may well be the closest that Nokia or any company has come to packing a real computer into a pocket-size package. But the high-end gizmo—aimed primarily at tech-savvy users—and its sophisticated software may not yet be the iPhone killer that Nokia shareholders have been hoping for. "Maemo is really only a small step in the right direction," says Neil Mawston, an analyst at market researcher Strategy Analytics.
N900: A Smartphone Laboratory

The N900, priced at $750 before operator subsidies, comes with enough memory to compete with laptops of a few years back: 32 gigabytes worth, enough to hold 40 hours of high-quality video, Nokia says. But aside from its top-of-the-line specs, what really sets it apart is the Maemo 5 software. A variant of the open-source Linux operating system, Maemo 5 lets users run several programs at once, browsing the Internet wirelessly and displaying graphics and video as fast as a PC. "A computer platform allows us to drive the convergence of mobile and Internet much more radically," says Michael Halbherr, a Nokia vice-president who works on mobile mapping applications from offices in Berlin.