If You Love Ovi, You’ll Hate The N900
Nokia is horrendous at services, this we know. The true level of this, however, is lost until you try to use the company’s latest and greatest product, the N900, with its latest and greatest services, the Ovi family of services. What’s even more silly is that the Nokia N900 has an icon for the Ovi Store – Nokia’s software store, predominantly loaded with Symbian applications, but with other content, too. Other Ovi services are unsupported, which just makes no sense at all.
What’s even more silly about the Ovi Store is that Maemo has its own built-in application ’store’, in the form of the Application Installer, which functions like the repositories in desktop Linux. This has been around since the first Maemo-powered device (The Nokia 770) and works just fine, with various repositories (with different levels of quality control) that you can add and download applications from. In fact, the maemo.org community requires that developers submit their applications through these official repositories now, with no room for the Ovi Store, apparently. This isn’t a dig at the maemo community, mind you, but rather against Nokia, as they should have integrated this better.
The Nokia N900 comes with a built-in GPS receiver, as well as a Maps application built-in. This maps application looks remarkably similar to Ovi Maps, which has been around on Symbian for years, but it lacks the crucial element – navigation. It seems you can only create routes on this application, and search for POIs. There is no support for voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation at this time, nor is there support to pre-load maps easily, like there is for the Symbian version of Ovi Maps. Lame.
Nokia’s seemingly-abandoned PIM synchronization service. I’ve been trying to get ahold of someone for months to figure out how my N97 created duplicates of all my contacts here, to no avail. Also, since it uses SyncML, it is not officially supported on the Nokia N900 – another completely missed opportunity.
Perhaps the most egregious of all is the lack of support for Ovi Suite, Nokia’s desktop companion application for its other phones (both S40 and Symbian). Nokia actually currently has two desktop applications, PC Suite and Ovi Suite. PC Suite has been around for years, is rock solid, and loaded with great features. It also fully supports the Nokia N900, both via Bluetooth and USB cable. Unfortunately, Ovi Suite, which has been around for a little over a year, doesn’t support the N900 at all, throwing up errors when you try to connect, as seen above.
This shouldn’t surprise you, though. At launch, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic – then Nokia’s first touchscreen device with S60 5th Edition, didn’t support most Ovi services, either. Given how long the Maemo operating system has been around, I think it’s completely absurd that it doesn’t have every Ovi service baked right in.
