KUALA LUMPUR: Nokia is taking bold strides in revamping their phone line-up with the latest N900 smartphone and In.Tech got a sneak peek at the upcoming Maemo-powered device last week at the Nokia Malaysia office.

First off, some background information on the N900 — it is Nokia’s game-changing phone that it hopes will reshape the way its smartphones work. The N900 sets itself apart from Nokia’s past efforts by running on a brand new Linux operating system called Maemo 5.

While the Maemo platform isn’t completely brand new (it was used before in Nokia’s N800 Internet Tablet in 2007), the reworked Maemo 5 holds lots of potential for the new generation of Nokia phones. On the outside

Before we get deeper into the Maemo platform, let’s take a look at what the N900 has to offer on the outside.

At a glance, you can clearly tell that the N900 is a touch-centric phone — it has a large 3.5in high resolution screen (800 x 480-pixels) with the majority of the buttons hidden along the side, leaving the screen as the centre of attention.

In fact, the only buttons you will find on the device are used to control the phone’s volume and 5-megapixel camera function.

The N900 takes some design cues from Nokia’s N series phones, most notably the N97.

While the phone feels a little chunky in the hand, it is still a cool touchscreen device with a slide-out Qwerty keypad for some serious typing.

Typing on the keypad is quite comfortable though it still takes some getting used to as the keys are pretty small and the space key is still a little off-centre to the right.

What we liked about the new keypad was the positioning of the directional buttons on the bottom right, which made it comfortable to use while navigating through long lines of text as well as for browsing full-size webpages.

Revamped

In terms of hardware specifications, the N900 is no slouch with a beefy ARM Cortex-A8 core processor running at 600MHz and 1GB of RAM  . It is powerful enough to run multiple applications and between different ones ­easily.

This brings us to the N900’s newly revamped user interface. Nearly everything about the interface looks cleaner and modern with a Web 2.0 feel as compared against the Symbian platform.

The N900’s user interface features four highly customisable home screens that are easily customised with shortcuts to ­applications and widgets.

For example, you can set up your ­mainpage to show the weather widget, see your calendar tasks for the day or a link to your favourite website.

Want to switch between applications on the fly? The N900’s new dashboard interface allows users to view and switch between all active applications.

So now, you can just as easily browse a webpage in one moment, check your text messages the next and browse through your pictures seamlessly with the new interface.

We saw the phone handle about five to six apps running at once without any hiccups, which is pretty commendable.

Nokia has changed some the phone’s basic functions — text messages are now arranged in a conversation-tree format with all messages with a single contact arranged within a single conversation.

The N900 also seems to be a very capable multimedia player — it plays H.264 and MPEG4 encoded videos well on its standard media player.

The accompanying stereo speakers on the phone are nice and loud enough for on-the-go viewing.

To top it all off, the phone’s got 32GB of internal storage, which gives you lots of room to store all your digital media.

If that’s not enough, users also have the option to expand the N900’s further with microSD cards.

Web browsing made easy

The main highlight of the new N900 is its new Mozilla-based web browser that’s able to render full webpages to fit on the phone’s high-res screen.

But what makes this browser unique is its support for Flash, so you can pretty much browse the Web as you would on your ­desktop PC right on your mobile phone.

The benefits include being able to view Flash-encoded webpages with animated graphics, watching YouTube videos and even play Flash games on your browser.

Nokia also demonstrated the N900 handling complex Flash-based pages like Facebook with relative ease, including Facebook games.

The new browser is also ­pretty speedy, loading ­webpages in a snap. Interacting with the browser was really simple as it uses touch-based gestures to navigate.

You can flick webpages to scroll up or down; double tap to zoom in to a section of the webpage; and swipe your finger across the screen to go back to a previous page.

Nokia Malaysia said the N900 should be available in the first quarter of the year. However no official price was given at the preview session.