Two little stories have caught my attention this week regarding the Nokia N900, Nokia’s new Maemo based Internet Tablet Phone.  Firstly, from Liam Green-Hughes (who has written up his First Looks review of the Nokia N900 here), and in that article he mentions a little third party utility called FM RDS Notify.  As the Nokia N900 ships, you have support for an FM transmitter, which when you connect to an RDS-compatible stereo (such as in the car), you will see “Nokia” displayed when music is playing.  However, FM RDS Notify takes that capability a stage further, and puts more useful information into the RDS data information of the FM signal, allowing details of the current music track playing to appear on the stereo instead.

However, it doesn’t stop there; it can also display the details of the current caller (should be be on the phone), or even display SMS messages.  Although the application is currently only in the Extras-devel repository, and not the more mainstream Extras respository, I’m sure it will move over in time, as the application develops.  It already has some impressive functionality for what is v0.3, and the first version was only released back in late December!

The other interesting app for the Nokia N900 is Barriosquare, which is a FourSquare client for the Nokia N900.  Now, FourSquare is only starting to become popular in the UK, but has been running for some while in the US.  FourSquare combines the Social Networking aspects of sites like Twitter and merges in the location, and there is even an element of competition on who can “login” to an individual location the most and claim the “Mayor” badge for that location.  Using the public API to the website, a single developer has managed to create the application.

And that’s the power of the Nokia N900; individual developers can create a free app for the device and release it via the repositories and then everyone can access that new utility, that new feature which enhances the whole device just a little more.  The same sort of idea is available for most platforms through their App Store, but Maemo developers have embraced the idea of the Linux repositories offering free applications, and many of the enhancement applications are going to remain free, even when Nokia release a paid App Store for Maemo.

Although in my mind it will never be an iPhone killer, the Nokia N900 is certainly a phone that any serious techie should at least consider seriously; even with all the work that’s gone into Maemo 5, it’s still a little bit specialised to recommend the Nokia N900 to someone not used to smartphones and tinkering with their phone, but for the target market, apps like these will continue to make the Nokia N900 shine.

Some content around Barriosquare courtesy of thenokiablog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.