The Nokia N9 is a unique device not only due to the buttonless design but also the original MeeGo OS, which is not used for any other smartphone. But the enthusiasts are able to turn even such a device into a high-end Android device porting an early build of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on it.

Alexey Roslyakov of NITDroid team got the chance to port Android to the handset calling his project a “Progress”. There are lots of bugs coming with the OS but still the device functions with a limited number of features just great.

The same team is currently working upon porting Android 4.0 ICS to the old Maemo-based Nokia N900. I bet this project will be no less interesting, considering the latest trial was pretty impressive.

The best thing about the Nokia N9 and the Android 4.0 is that the device doesn’t have any physical buttons, while this OS doesn’t require any. Another good point is the presence of a large 3.9 inch display which allows to have a comfy navigation among the apps and while web browsing.

And finally the enthusiasts mentions that soon he will be able to provide the functionality of both MeeGo and Android on the Nokia N9. The users will just require to reboot their handsets to change the OS.

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The Nokia N9 can now be viewed in landscape mode. This will allow to have a Nokia N900-similar experience and use the three appealing screens in that mode.

It takes only a few minutes to make the landscape mode available on this MeeGo device. To use it, you should use N9 Tweak. So your first step should be to get the Nokia N9 Tweak. Afterwards, you need to activate the Landscape mode (type “L”). Then it asks for a password. Make sure to get a no-capital letter password to avoid possible further problems.

Landscape view looks awesome on the Nokia N9. Unlike several old Symbian models, like the Nokia 5230, the device uses the entire screen capacity. All the features, including the horizontal Swype technology are usable while in landscape mode.

After you enable the landscape mode, flip the smartphone to switch from landscape to portrait mode simultaneously. Landscape mode is especially useful while reading news-feed, as the news articles appear in bigger fonts, so you won’t need to go through long lines to read a single info.

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The unlocked version of the Nokia N900 mobile computer is now available in the U.S. You can now purchase it from Amazon.com for $349.

Perhaps you have already heard about this advanced smartphone and its specs. If not, let me tell about them a bit. The Nokia N900 has a powerful 600 MHz processor, about 1GB of application memory (256 MB RAM + 768 MB virtual memory) and a 3D graphics accelerator with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, so all the applications and programs run and work quickly. The Operating System is Maemo 5, and some useful programs like a PDF document viewer and Adobe Flash Player 9.4 are also included.

The phone has 32GB of built-in storage, which can be expanded up to 48GB with an external microSD card. It’s enough to store several thousands of mp3 songs or dozens of hours of high quality video. Not bad, is it? By the way, the music and video players support MP3/WMA/WAV/ WMV/RealVideo/MP4/AVI/XviD.

As for the camera, it’s not as powerful as some other Nokia phones (like the Nokia N8, for example) – 5 megapixel only, but with a dual LED flash and Carl Zeiss optical lens. So it can still make decent images and high quality widescreen (800 × 480) videos. The phone also has a VGA camera for videocalling.

As for the other features of the Nokia N900, it has a 3.5 inch touchscreen with a resolution of 800 × 480 and a fully integrated QWERTY keyboard. The display shows up to 65K colors.

I forgot to mention that the Nokia N900 is a 3G smartphone (HSDPA, 10Mbps; HSUPA, 2Mbps) and it is equipped with Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth with A2DP, Quadband GSM with GPRS and EDGE.

The battery of the phone is removable (BL-5J 1320mAh) and quite powerful: the talk-time is 6.5 hours. The dimensions of the Nokia N900 are 110.9 x 59.8 x 18 mm, and it weighs 181g.

Nokia N900 is a Maemo-powered smartphone and it looks like the device doesn’t have a real success in the smartphone market. But Nokia is not one of the companies that surrenders without a fight and it decided to reach two goals by one shoot: today Jukka Elund, Product Manager at Nokia, announced they would bring MeeGo to the Nokia N900.

This could mean only one thing, Nokia doesn’t want to lose one more smartphone and wants to promote an alternative mobile platform which can replace Windows Phone if the last one doesn’t prove itself.

Here is what Jukka said:

Hi there,

I am thrilled to announce a little thing we started at Nokia. Basically we want to have MeeGo running in N900 device, so that it’s really usable as your daily development device. Basic Handset UX should work, phone calls, SMS, web browsing. So we are concentrating on a few selected features and polish those to be “perfect”. It might mean that we leave out some things in MeeGo 1.2 trunk for this edition, but that is not the default intention.

We are doing this fully on the open, and I hope this is an interesting project where we all in the community work towards the same goal: have a great MeeGo edition in the N900. This work is naturally based on the great work done already by N900 adaptation team lead by Harri and Carsten.

The wiki is up here:·http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/DeveloperEdition. It will populated with more information as we go, thanks for the patience.

Jukka Developer Edition product manager

twitter.com/jukkaeklund
IRC: jukka

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jukkaeklund

The Nokia N900 has been launched in 2009, and if that time Nokia’s failures weren’t obvious and no one thought to pay more attention to one failed smartphone. But now when the company’s deals are not so well, saying modestly, every device could become the “savior” of Nokia and it is clear why the Nokia N900 has appeared in the center of events. So we have only wish Nokia not to fail again.

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I begin to talk more about Nokia phones with such platforms like MeeGo, Symbian, Qt and even S40. And this after Nokia announced their cooperation with Microsoft to use Windows Phone OS in their future high-end devices. So if you think it’s just thoughts, I have come with facts – Nokia will launch a MeeGo-powered handset this year.

The words come to the Nokia N950 which is the successor of the N900. When we posted the Nokia N9 will be dropped off because of another handset, there were no words about the Nokia N950. But now we know for sure the Nokia N950 is that MeeGo-based smartphone the company is working on seriously.

Though Nokia’s CTO Rich Green didn’t show any photos of upcoming device at Nokia’s Developer Day, but here is a video where Green gave an extensive talk about the future of current Nokia platforms. As Nokia didn’t drop of MeeGo, we wondered what view the phone will have, and he told they have come up with some “very elegant” hardware and interesting UI.

If Green’s words become true and the Nokia N950 will be such awesome feature as he claimed, no one will accuse the Finnish company why they had dropped the Nokia N9. And according to Green’s words, the Nokia N950 is well-stocked as a developer platform and “we’ll see how that goes”. So we can assume it will be designed not for mass market but more towards developers.

I understand why Nokia continues to work on Qt for MeeGo, Symbian and Series 40, because there is not any guaranties Windows Phone will take out Nokia from this marsh immediately.

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I guess you have seen the Nokia N900 running Android for several times, and after all cases when the phone was hacked, we understood this handset is one of the most hackable, versatile and customizable devices. At this time we can see a 100% working version of Android 2.3 (aka Gingerbread) running on this smartphone while no other Android-powered device has got an update until today.

Recall there is only one smartphone sporting Gingerbread platform – the Google Nexus S, and one tablet running Android 3.0 (aka Honeycomb) – The Galaxy Tab.

This is produced by the NITDroid team, especially by Alexey Roslyakov, and according to their report, the Nokia N900 feels quite good with its new OS and provides WiFi, 3G, Sound and other features, but there are some bugs that must be fixed.

Unfortunately, there is no Maemo 6 phone to be compared with this one, so we can only assume which OS is better – the Maemo 5 or Android 2.3.

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According to the Mashable, two models of Nokia were in the Google’s top five most frequent searches among consumer electronics. We talk on the Nokia N900 (5^th position) and the Nokia 5530 (3^rd position).

What is remarkable, the most talked smartphone of the company, N8 didn’t get into the top. And this is after a huge amount of news, reviews, rumors and assumptions before the phone’s official announcement and release.

Anyway, on the first position was the iPad, but Apple has got another gadget in this list – the iPhone 4 that took the second place. The HTC Evo 4G was the fourth.

Though it is gladsome for Nokia that its two devices are very popular, but the company has a reason to worry, as it has launched a few smartphones lately to be noted too, but they didn’t.

All those who are not satisfied with the Symbian OS hope that MeeGo will be the platform which can change the treatment formed around the company’s primary operating system. But yesterday Nokia business smartphones chief, Ilari Nurmi, made a statement which disappoint many Nokia users very much.

Undoubtedly Symbian is a great OS and many low-end smartphones have a good cooperation with it, but this platform doesn’t suffice flagship products. When Nokia launched the N900 running Maemo, we all began to look at Nokia phones in a different way. So the project picked up steam and became MeeGo, and it seemed Nokia would switch into other kind of platform with better features.

In an interview with ZDNet UK Ilari Nurmi said that MeeGo had many plans with MeeGo, and they keep in mind different types of needs and wishes in the enterprise market, but MeeGo won’t be a replacement for Symbian and the last will continue to be their primary platform.

The Symbian is the primary platform today and will be the primary platform in the future.

Apparently the success which the Nokia N900 has got is not enough to make MeeGo the main feature of Nokia’s business smartphones.

Nevertheless, the first MeeGo device will be launched early in 2011, and probably the company wants to know what kind of responses it will get.

Those who haven’t yet had a time to buy the Nokia N900 or it was too expensive for them, Amazon comes with a cool deal offering the phone for $349.99 without any contract. Agree, that’s a really  great offer, as the N900 is one of the company’s mid-range smartphones sporting many useful features.

The handset’s ex price was $649, and though it was release more than a year ago, but it didn’t lose the popularity among business smartphone users. The Nokia N900 runs Maemo OS, which is probably the most vulnerable feature of the handset, because other features don’t yield today’s high-class smartphone; 3.5 inch touchscreen, 5MP camera with dual LED flash, Carl Zeiss Optics and autofocus, ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz processor, 32GB internal memory and 256MB RAM, etc.

If you are not sure whether to get it or not, here are some interesting facts about the Nokia N900 which will help you to oriantate.

The possibilities of Nokia N900 keep us surprising. Recently a good video was posted on Youtube by a user fukywak. The video demonstrates the N900 running WebOS games smoothly without the need to boot into a different operating system.

It is seen in the video that The Sims3 and Need for Speed Undercover run very well on an N900 without any trouble and what is more important with quality.

Check out the video for more!