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Have you ever seen meedieval castle with lots of potraits hanging around? Every single one reminds of great man, someone who did something really significant for country, region or family. Today let’s focus on some other portrait, the one related to our favourite phone, Nokia N900.
Portrait dashboard is something we could already see after previous CSSU update, so the only remaining thing was to propagate this feature to homescreen, which finally happened. Because everyday I see less and less news on N900 I feel obliged to mention it for the ones who haven’t yet updated.
I was a bit surprised that after update my N900 just switched to portrait mode after rotating it, but widgets, shortcuts and bookmarks were a bit messed up. It’s still not a problem, because portrait has its own setting for each homescreen, so you can easily rearrange all of your widgets on screen and make them look exactly as you want. Unfortunatelly some of really wide widgets (like 5 days weather forecast) just won’t fit in portrait, but I can live with that, can you?
Another tiny issue with portrait mode is loopable wallpaper, if you haveone that loops in landscape, it will probably make you feel uncomfortable, but for me it’s perfect situation for new inventions, wallpaper that will be loopable in potrait and landscape at the same time. I’ll surely share with you when I find some time to make one .
That’s enough for starters, our King is still alive, still breathing and has own portrait . Now that you know what comes with the latest update, just try it!
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MJ

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As you can see in article about auto-rotating homescreen widget, from few days ago, some developers are already thinking of automatic portrait mode for Nokia N900. It appears that system developers have also thought about it on wider scale than it is available right now.
Some time ago, when N900 firmware was in it’s early stage there was a bug that allowed to enable portrait mode. I’ve never tried it to be honest, quickly opening and closing application when sliding the keyboard at the time, I just thought it’s too tricky.
Now there is possibility to enable portrait mode and automatic rotation in most of the applications by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R. When you do this, you can see application rotation when you have keyboard closed and rotate the phone, but the effect is still not perfect, I’d even say it’s far far away from perfect. For example contact list looks pretty good, but when you open a contact card it goes back to landscape and you need to press key combination again. Some apps just doesn’t look good in portrait, like conversations are truncated, media player looks more like messed puzzles. Some of the applications may even become completely unusable, because touchscreen mapping will not work in new orientation.
So if it does not actually work why to even mention it? I think that leaving this kind o functionality inside Nokia N900 is like telling us ‘this is proof o portrait mode concept, it can be done and we’re working on it, but still need some time’. At least I hope it’s like that.

–
MJ

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People say that Nokia N900 lacks portrait mode in homescreen and applications. Some time ago I’ve found desktop widget with pretty descriptive name (shown in my app manager) Application launcher widget with portrait mode a.k.a. DrLaunch.
There are some applications that already have portrait mode, like built-in phone that probably everyone uses, Brain Party or SPB Brain Evolution 2. Mostly I was placing application shortcuts for these to be reachable with my thumb when phone is rotated to portrait (but still icons were showing in landscape specific way). I was even thinking of creating alternative icons rotated to appear ‘portretized’.
One day i’ve discovered this strangely long name in application manager, and found it interesting. Auto rotating widget appeared on my homescreen with 4 application shortcuts. After digging in options I’ve found that grid may contain maximum 16 applications but if you have something on your wallpaper that you want to have visible you can leave some empty spaces. All of placed shortcuts are rotating along with the phone, so in portrait you have all of the grid rotated by 90 degrees. Another nice feature I like in this widget is that it doesn’t start application after shortest tap, you need to press for about half a second, so it prevents starting applications by accident when you have some turbulences in bus or tram and tap shortcut on the homescreen by accident.
I find this widget really useful and I think it’s small step ahead to have more interactive homescreen. More widgets should be auto-rotating, especially if they’re square-shaped, which should be fairly easy to do, no complex transformations or resizing. There is really big potential in this widget.
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MJ

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Throughout generations, the knowledge was passed in books, manuscripts, scrolls and many other forms of writing. Civilization as we know now tailored idea of books to let it be helpful while broadening horizons, improving skills or just for fun. This is why I like reading, but living fast don’t leave much time to read. Some say that audiobooks are good solution for working people, because all you need is to play and listen. I still prefer paper books, but I still find idea of audiobooks very useful to learn and practice languages for example.
When I first saw Panucci in the app manager, with piece of pizza as and icon it reminded me of ‘Panucci’s pizza’, fictional restaurant from a great TV series – Futurama. I just had to try and it turned out that it’s pretty good audiobook player and something I just needed.
Latest version of Panucci allows you to enqueue few files, navigation buttos allow you to skip 10 seconds or 1 minute forward or barkwards, you can also use progress bar to navigate. You can also find nice feature of running in portrait mode. So what’s the advance from plain media player? When you want to have a break from ‘reading’ you can pause and close application, when you start it again you can continue from exactly the same point. You can also add bookmarks if you need to quickly jump to important parts.
Unfortunately ‘auto-play on headset’ feature works only with Nokia headset shipped with N900, or as some claims any headset with microphone, so since I use my old headphones, just because I got used to it, this option is useless for me. ‘Lock progress bar’ option, that I never use, blocks navigation using progress bar of current media not to jump to random place by accident.
In sum: Panucci is served under simple yet quite funcional UI and has the most important features of audiobook player. It already helps me with my japanese lessons, I hope it can be also useful for you.

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After having received a firmware update weeks ago (read about it on our related post by clicking here) which it only fixed bugs problem, the Nokia N900 have finally received a new firmware update with major improvements. Under the code name 2.2009.51.1 or as we head up PR1.1, the update brings wide range of improvements as new features, bug fixes too and optimizes functionality and stability of the phone across many applications.
As it’s described on the Nokia Conversations Blog: “First up is support for the Swiss keymat variant with hardware and virtual keyboard layouts supporting the combination of German, Italian and English characters. We’ll also see full compatibility with certain SIM cards from network operator 3. Although only a small number of SIM cards were impacted at the time, this release means the N900 is now fully compatible with 3 SIM cards.”
In addition, Mail for Exchange and Ovi Maps also sees an update. The first one by allowing it to work with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 giving the possibility of Exchange integration to a much broader group of users. And second one by improvement made to search performance and route calculation.
Among these major changes and much smaller usability improvements, there is a new hidden featured and it has been the most required one. As you might imagine, this new firmware update able the portrait mode! Pressing the key combination Ctrl + Shift + O activates the accelerometer giving the possibility to the device to distinguish between horizontal and vertical. However, it seems that it only works on the web browser and the virtual keyboard doesn’t show on vertical format. Here is a video about it!

For much more details about the improvements and advantages of this new firmware update, please click here.
As the earlier update (1.2009.44.1) main aim was to prepare the device’s application manager for over the air updates, any user who have installed it would received a notification about a new firmware update available. The update it also available through the Nokia Software Updater, if over the air is not an option for you and you would update from …

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The lack of Portrait Mode for applications other than the phone on the Nokia N900 has been an issue since its announcement. If you remember on the early post on this Blog, we pointed out this people opinion on the Conversations Nokia poll. Probably because with the device stuck in landscape mode, it’s a two-handed device only. A really challenging experience for common-day-use. But take it easy because fortunately Nokia has promised an update that includes at least partial portrait mode support around Christmas. Just a few days!
However, for the impatient people who can wait until some day near Christmas, it seems that you can trick your Nokia N900 into portrait mode somehow as the following video shows.

Apparently there is an existing bug on the Nokia N900 which gives you this opportunity. The bad news for all the lucky readers that already have the Nokia N900 on their hands is that I wasn’t able to find the exact procedure, sorry. All I know is that you’re supposed to launch the phone application (via accelerometer), and then slide the keyboard open while the phone is launching, then close the phone app just as quickly as you can.
If you already saw the video, you should have caught that the UI isn’t working completely harmonic on the portrait mode. It doesn’t adjust very well due to being a bug and not something on purpose that’s my guess.

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This is the final result from the poll done by Nokia Conversations last week. The most voted was the one which was winning on the last post about this subject which was: “ability to run everything on the N900 in portrait mode”. I think that this is an interesting issue but, in my opinion it´s more important the one with the second place on the poll: “MMS”.
This is a known issue which I want to clarified first. On some post I wrote about the Nokia N900 being able to work with MMS and this is a mistake. This was due to a very vague sentence on the Nokia Official web page about the N900 specs where I understood that the support of these protocol depended on the operator’s decision. Please check it for your-self by clicking here. I want to thanks to one of our readers for pointing me out this.
Summarizing, the Nokia N900 doesn’t actually support MMS, and this issue came second on the poll when in my opinion should have been on first place. For more information about this poll, please go to the Nokia Conversations page or click here.