Announced in August, 2009 but available 2 months later? I am surprised. Read on this Nokia N900 review for more.
The Nokia N900 has really big dimensions of 110.9 x 59.8 x 18 mm, 113 cc. But it actually makes sense as the device is a mini computer. with 181 grams, it is heavy. These are the reasons that the Nokia N900.
The huge screen has 800 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches which makes it great for gaming.

Meet Xournal, another type of a writer but its only problem is that it is a prototype like so not everything is present unfortunately.
It is an application for note-taking, it keeps a journal using a stylus and you can sketch with it but of course, it can also be used to add notations to PDF files.
I am sure that you noticed that Xournal does have similarity to other programs developed for Linux such as Jarnal, Gournal and Windows Journal.
Xournal is compatible with Maemo 4 (OS2008) which is running on the Nokia N800 and the Nokia N810 Internet Tablets including Maemo 5 which of course is being used on the Nokia N900.

Recently I received very nice present from very important person. She knew that I will be happy to get newest album of my favourite bassist Wojtek Pilichowski. Unfortunately my N900 doesn’t have a CD player , so I need to rip it (as many times before) to media files understandable by my portable player.

Under Linux there are a lot of CD rippers, but I use the one that seems to be default for Ubuntu – Sound Juicer, it has few profiles to choose, including loseless flac files. Good thing about this software is that it reads additional CD data like artist name and titles for all the tracks and album, which makes one step of tagging files less, but it also has option to download tags from MusicBrainz. Actually just after this simple process my mp3s are ready, waiting in music directory to upload to the N900.

When I use Windows computer I use CDEx, free for non-commercial use. It’s highly configurable but still you can use it out-of-the-box. It’s enough just to click and wait for results. It’s good to check preferences to see where files will go, for me it was ‘C:\Program Files\CDEx\my music’ directory. It also has ability to read additional data or to download tags from CDDB, so there shouldn’t be any problem with tags for your music files.

And practically it’s finished, it doesn’t matter if you have personal PC with Windows or Linux, you can freely play your new music on your N900.
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Wojtek Pilichowski and Fair of Noise are trademarks of Wojtek Pilichowski.
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

I was very curious about the Theme Maker. The new version 1.2.9, which supports also the N900 has been out for a while and I wanted to try making a theme of my own to use it on my phone. After downloading Theme Maker from the Maemo Garage section, there was no installing necessary, just unzipping the folder to the desktop. First I didn’t know how it could work, and the instructions are a little bit exhausting to read. I am also more the learning by doing type.
After getting more and more into the material I asserted that this one isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. First of all you really need an image editing software. The package includes templates with all the buttons, backgrounds, icons, etc. which can be edited, but it’s kind of complicated, because all the drafts are in just one layer. So in principle you have to make new ones because just changing or replacing colors would not lead to satisfying results. Once you have done all the creative work, the compilation process is the easy part. This is actually the program. Starting Theme Maker and pointing to the paths of the created image files, clicking the “Build” button will do the rest.
A new theme is created which can be installed on the phone. I didn’t managed it yet. It is really a lot of work to make a fine theme to personalize your device.
Fact is, with Theme Maker you are of course able to build a theme, but you have to be a graphic designer with good tools to construct a real shiny one. It is really not comparable with carbide.ui.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -