Nokia N900 goes official, Technical Markus goes “WANT! NOW!”

It’s well-known that I’m a Sony Ericsson junkie. since 2003, every one of my phones has been a Sony Ericsson smartphone. I loves ‘em. So when I say that a Nokia phone is currently the one I’m most excited about, it should give you an idea of just how brilliant I reckon the Nokia N900, which has been officially unveiled, actually is…

It is going to, absolutely and unequivocally, rock.

Right, first up, the hardware specs. The Nokia N900’s running an ARM processor, running at 600MHz, and it uses OpenGL ES 2.0, which basically translates as “super fast 3D graphics, on a lightning fast phone”. Storage isn’t going to be an issue, because, like its Symbian sibling the Nokia N97, the N900’s got 32Gb built-in, and a memory card slot that’ll let you up the storage to 48Gb. Oh, and like the N97, it’s got a full QWERTY keyboard. Oh, and in terms of what you might call more phone-esque hardware, it’s got GPS, Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi, 10Mbps HSDPA, and a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lenses. The screen’s a 3.5 inch beastie, and is running at a whopping 800×480 resolution.

All nice and powerful, but they’re not really revolutionary; all those bits are like an evolution of the N97.

And yet, the Nokia N900 is the single most revolutionary phone to come out of Finland for a long time. And since it’s not the hardware that’s revolutionary, what’s really floating my boat is the software in it. The operating system. Because unlike previous Nokia smartphones, it’s not Symbian. The N900 is actually descended from their range of internet tablets, and when you fire up the device, dear god does it show!

What it actually runs on is Maemo, a variant of Linux. You get true multitasking, you get a slidy, panoramic interface akin to what you get on the HTC Hero (or on the SPB Mobile Shell I use on my phone), and you get a truly slick, gorgeous user experience. Ah, but of course, the big thing is that Maemo is open source, much like Android, so expect lots of rather nice, juicy apps to add to the phone, in the fullness of time.

And then, there’s web browsing. The N900, as I said, was born from the range of Internet Tablets Nokia made, and you’d expect it to have a decent browsing experience, yes?

Well… I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that the browsing experience may be just about the best seen on any mobile phone to date, because the web browser itself is built on Mozilla technology.

Yes, that Mozilla…

The one what makes Firefox…

With full touch controls, and smooth kinetic scrolling, the browser in and of itself is stunning. However, it’s also got Flash 9.4 built-in, so it actually goes beyond stunning into some weird pseudo-biblical goodness that makes mere mortals’ heads explode.

In short, it’s good. Can you tell? But hey, don’t take my word for it, see for yourself how luvverly it actually is, with some official videos of the phone in action!