Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, and of course, I’m a huge fan of the well-known Firefox browser. What? You’re reading this article with another browser? Go adopt immediately a Red Panda, now!

Last week, I was in our London office, and I talked with the guy in charge of Social Media for Nokia (fantastic guy, by the way) and his N97 started to ring. After his conversation, I engaged the discussion on the forthcoming N900, embedding Firefox Mobile, codenamed “Fennec”. And by chance, the guy was playing with it …
Hopefully, I had my camera not too far. I just took these few pictures.

I had not enough time to make an in depth review. However, I played with the browser and with the device for a few minutes.

First impression: it’s glossy, it’s black, it’s sexy.

The people in charge of the design at Nokia are making remarkable efforts, and the N900 is probably one of the most convincing one. The keyboard slider looks remarkable and very robust. It’s a bit thicker than an iPhone, but would perfectly fit in my pocket

Second impression: it’s not S60 – Penguin inside.

Nokia for many years has been working on its Symbian platform, making it the most popular OS for mobile in the world. But looking back to the first steps of Nokia in the tactile world, it seems this OS has difficulties to keep racing against iPhone’s OS or Android’s OS in term of ergonomic, ease of use and user interface. But Nokia secret weapon could be with open source OS. Nokia is experimenting since many years now its Maemo OS, based on the Linux platform, slowly nurturing its community. And having played a few minutes with it, the interface is truly remarkable, far ahead what the Symbian OS could do. And probably the best answer from Nokia regarding the incoming Android Phone and the iPhone.

Third impression: it’s not Firefox – it’s Mobile Firefox.

During the few minutes with the N900, I especially focused on the browser. I carefully followed all the development stage of Fennec, and I must admit that I’ve been truly impressed to test it “live” and to see that Mozilla has made a fantastic job by bringing Internet to the mobile. Of course, iPhone definitely created a market with its iPhone (internet on mobile). But now, Mozilla is in the place, and it is truly great news, since they managed to make a real “mobile Firefox”, not “Firefox redux” or “crappy Firefox for phones”.
I encourage you to have a look at Jay Sullivan demonstration of Firefox Mobile. Nope, it’s not photoshoped, I also did that last week

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih5SrhCJukI&hl=fr&fs=1&rel=0]

As a conclusion

This article isn’t only to talk about a nice glossy incoming new phone. The N900 is probably a milestone, by bringing true internet access and raw computer capacities to mobile worker and internet nomad addicts … Can’t wait to test it more extensively, and to see how the ecosystem will work (on today’s phone, the “markets” and the “stores” plays a big role in phone success – look at the itune store and the the android market … probably a big challenge for Nokia).

Looks like just found a new thing to add on my whishlist for Christmas …

More info : http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/

Author : Kerolic