Two OMAP 3430 Phones: Nokia N900 and Motorola Droid

Maemo's App Store

Nokia offers a simple application marketplace called the Ovi Store. In practice, this isn't anywhere near fleshed out like it should be, as launching the Ovi Store fires up the browser and takes you to the Ovi Store in the N900's browser. What's much more compelling is the Applications Manger, which is a well disguised debian package manager frontend, but admittedly polished enough to be used exclusively. You can add 'catalogs' - Nokia's parlance for repositories - from within here, and choose from a huge selection of FOSS packages that install over the air on the N900. The applications manager is every bit a graphical package manager, you can uninstall, download, and update every package on the phone.

It has categorization and feels like it was given plenty of thought, but really lacks the kind of polish other application marketplaces do on other platforms. For example - open up a big category with a couple hundred applications, and you'll find yourself scrolling for a few minutes to get to the desired one.

 

Take one look through the packages, and you'll know that Maemo has serious potential in the right hands - what other application marketplace has Wireshark, Kismet, Aircrack-ng and Nmap sitting unsuspectingly inside? That's awesome!

The Browser

There has been an enormous volume of debate centering around Flash on mobile platforms lately. While Android 2.2 will eventually bring full Flash 10.1 and AIR support to the entire platform, it's impressive to think about how the N900's browser on Maemo has been running full Flash 9.4 since release.

Until Froyo 2.2 brings a faster browser and Flash support to Android, it's difficult to not argue that the N900 offers the best browsing experience on the platform.

Out of box, the Mozilla-supported browser is almost all you need. There's even extension support for AdBlock Plus directly in the marketplace - and best of all? It works perfectly.

Almost all the Flash content I tried played fine, though the implementation still isn't perfect. I can understand now what Adobe means when it notes that only certain video codecs play back smoothly or are "mobile optimized."

For example, playing videos on Vimeo resulted in extremely choppy framerate and audio - the experience was unwatchable. However, YouTube videos played back perfectly, complete with audio. Hulu refuses to work on the platform, though this is likely due to the licensing issues they maintain prevent them from streaming to mobile devices. Who knows, perhaps support is just a user-agent string change away.

If the OS default browser doesn't suit you, there's also Firefox and Chromium in the marketplace.

Chromium on the N900 is very beta, but Firefox is almost good enough to supplant the normal browser. It's slower feeling, but has a very desktop feel.