Products & Services
PUSHing the Nokia N900
By JBC on 15 September 2009
LONDON, England – This weekend, at the onedotzero festival, Nokia announced a new initiative dubbed PUSH N900. It’s all about hacking, and the push (we assume) refers to pushing the N900 beyond your own expectations. We’ve already shown how the N900 was used to manipulate a projected image at the festival, and the folks from Tinker.it and Hyper spent Sunday afternoon showing off some projects they’ve already created with the aid of the N900. But PUSH N900 isn’t just any old gesture, it’s a bone fide competition where hackers, designers and creative types can submit their ideas, the winners bagging funding, support and kit to make them happen. Once the ideas are reality, they’ll be put on show in Nokia Flagship stores around the world.
Unveiled at the weekend were four very cool, albeit wacky uses for an N900. Like using a sledgehammer for a pin, they pretty much all provided an over engineered solution for problems that didn’t really exist. But that wasn’t the point. 80s gadgets were the inspiration and starting with a Speak and Spell, and some Arduino circuitry, the team managed to use the eighties toy to send a text message to a member of the gathered throng (using the N900, of course). Next up a Rolodex which identified a contact’s details and pulled them up on the N900, along with a View-Master which was used, together with the phone’s camera, to create 3D images. Oh, and that’s not to forget the radio hack which helped the device identify music from the 80s.
We talked a little about open source hardware last week, following our visit to the open source talk at onedotzero. PUSH N900 takes that whole ideal on a stage further and I think we’re going to see an array of very cool ideas come to life over the coming months. It’s one thing the N900 being a Linux-based device. It’s a whole other issue when we discover what that might actually mean. Excited? You bet!
Related posts:
- Nokia N900 at onedotzero – behind the scenes video
- N900 to appear in London next week!
- PUSH N900 Mod in the USA challenge
Tags | Nokia N900, onedotzero, PUSH N900
September 15th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Nokia always does good phones, but most of them are too complicated for an ordinary user. And this open source hardware wont give any advantage.
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September 15th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I’m glad Nokia is really following through with their new attitude of openness. What company is willing to open their arms to hackers; hell, what company is willing to use that title in their marketing?!
Thank you Nokia.
I’d be even more thankful if the guys at the Beta labs could develop that 3D View-Master to be usable on an N86!
Thanks!
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September 16th, 2009 at 11:37 am
How many, let’s say ordinary consumers are a little bewildered by this? I mean, all the wacky, freaky uses for N900 are fun, and any strengthening of ties with hackers, open source community etc. is all a big plus. But as technology is nowadays a consumer market, there should also be “push” in making all Nokia has to offer, cool and readable for the ordinary consumer. Great things are born in the margin, but they become great only when the masses begin to know about them.
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Anonymous Reply:
September 16th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Excellent points.
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September 17th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
when is the nokia 5530 xm phone releasing in india??
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September 17th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I love the sentiment, but wouldn’t it have been a better idea to start this contest AFTER the device is available?
The comments above about the contest confusing consumers it misguided, development contests aren’t promoted to consumers and even if they heard about it, I’m fairly sure that the average consumer would like the idea of thousands of programmers working on making software that would make the N900 better.
The same thing goes for the misguided comment about open source making the N900 more complicated than an S40 or S60 device. The N900 will be a finished product and non-technical users won’t know or care if the source code for the software running on their phone is free for others to use or not.
I’m still predicting that the N900 will be more successful than Nokia seems to be preparing for. After using the device, I’m very impressed, and can’t wait to get hold of one with “final” shipping software. The idea that developers will be incentivized to write cool apps just seems like a bonus, even though I’m not expecting to write any myself.
-dw
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The Camel Reply:
September 21st, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Hi Dave. The competition, though geared for hardware-hacking, is ideas-based. So we submit our ideas without any need to hack the actual phone. This allows us to make submissions before the phone comes out.
I like the idea of using the accelerometer and viewscreen to control a remote-controlled car with a camera and bluetooth receiver fitted to it.
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msav Reply:
September 21st, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Yeah, of course developers differ from the average customers. But as this is the the official Nokia blog and not a developers’ lair per se, I would still argue that a lot of the stuff that is announced here, while interesting, have very little impact to the average consumer (who in the end might use the applications this contest will produce in due time). The push-competition, a great thing, is still marketing money spent. But I’m just saying that if you’ve ever heard about the N900 and you might go to nokia.com you get into a maze of of specs and links buried somewhere under upcoming devices. You might go to maemo.nokia.com, but you probably wouldn’t, because it’s a bit too much extra work for a consumer to start finding out what this maemo-thing is. And so, if you’re reading the Nokia blog, a would be direct stream from the heart of Nokia, you find a developers competition. And for a consumer, it’s just not a clear message of what the whole thing is and how does it do the stuff that you’d like to do.
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September 22nd, 2009 at 1:08 am
Why Nokia Why is this phone not supported by AT&T network. Ive been waiting on the right phone after the n95 now Nokia makes such a phone and it wont work on my network. Question will there be one son for AT&T
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October 7th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
when its comin out ?
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October 20th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
I am also very upset with this device not able to support the AT&T 3G Network. In which case why a US version is being sold on the website ? They could have clearly indicated that it doesn’t support AT&T 3G/HSDPA. I now have to wait for the preorder to be received and send it back
Have been a loyal nokia customer from my first mobile device.
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