Nokia sold less than 100,000 top-of-the-range N900 smartphones

Nokia sold less than 100,000 top-of-the-range N900 smartphones in its first five months on the market, researcher Gartner said, indicating it has yet to mount a serious challenge to the iPhone and Blackberry.The chunky computer-like handset  with slide-out keyboard and a touch screen   has found support among hard-core technology specialists but failed to attract a wider audience.

A spokesman for Nokia, the world’s top cellphone maker, declined to comment on the sales number, saying the company was pleased with sales, but an executive was more bullish.”Sales have substantially exceeded expectations,” Alberto Torres, head of Nokia’s solutions business, told the Open Mobile Summit trade conference in London this week.

Nokia has been unable to mount a serious challenge to Apple three years after the iPhone’s launch. Its last hit smartphone model, the N95, was unveiled in 2006.The sales of less than 100,000 N900s compares with sales of 8.75 million iPhones in January-March alone.

The N900, which went on sale last November, is Nokia’s first phone running the Linux Maemo operating system, which analysts see as a key for Nokia to regain ground in the coming years.

In February this year Nokia unveiled a plan to merge Maemo with Intel’s Moblin operating system.Nokia sold 50,000 N900s in the last quarter of 2009, and quarterly sales fell in January-March, Gartner statistics showed. Gartner does not track phone sales per model, but as the N900 is the only phone using Maemo, the statistics for operating systems show sales for the model.(Reuters)

Nokia N900, The Computer Cell

Leading mobile phone maker from Finland, Nokia, again making a new breakthrough. In the near future they will release a new series, the Nokia N900. Once the sophistication of these products, so mention that this is a miniature version of a computer. No doubt the title as a mobile computer attached to this product. Features and advantages make it more suitable gadget called a portable computer than a phone.

Nokia N900 itself uses operating system Linux-based Maemo. Maemo technology allows the Nokia N900 has a high performance result N900 allows users to perform a variety of things like being on the computer desktop, including the opening of various applications, for instant messaging, calendar, contacts, etc. simultaneously and without the constraint means. This is because the Nokia N900 has been equipped with high-capable processor at the heart of the main.

Features superior owned by Nokia N900 more complete as many offline and online applications can be opened quickly, to maximize results, this application memory can be added up to 1GB. Games on mobile enthusiasts also will feel the sensation of playing for fun in the 3D graphics accelerator technology in the Nokia N900 is very pampering eyes.

To accommodate mobile users who frequent online wherever and whenever the Nokia N900 is a good choice. Classical problems such as long loading on any other smart phone hardly found on the Nokia N900. This sophisticated phone allows the fans on Facebook games like Mafia Wars, Mob Wars or the Texas Holdem Poker can play hard.

Users of the Nokia N900 also be at the same time to chat or browse in cyberspace without the constraints mean that the power of the processor allows the user to move windows easily. All open applications directly just by touching or sliding a view screen.

Not only that, the Nokia N900 also accommodate users who want audio visual entertainment as a whole. Users just choose a song or movie collection and favorite music video clips with easy access from one screen.

Afraid of getting lost on the road? No need to worry! Nokia N900 is equipped with technology A-GPS (Assisted-Global Positioning System) and Ovi Maps application that allows its users to find points of complex nan road in a city. Want to have all the sophistication of this product? Wait for the presence of the Nokia N900 which is also known as “mobile computer” was in Indonesia at the end of March 2010.

Pogoplug only supports USB 2.0

pogoplug

Pogoplug was a PCMag Editors’ Choice in its first version. Now CloudEngine’s latest iteration of its multimedia sharing device has been updated with several new features including a lurid purple-pink cable stand. It does what it did before: give you fast access, locally or remotely, to your USB storage devices—up to four of them, instead of just one. There are multimedia enhancements: you can stream almost any video file, do automatic media synching, and perform improved contact management. All of which helps make up for the $30 price increase from the original.

Although it does have more USB ports as well as a 1 GB Ethernet port, this little, Linux-based device isn’t significantly larger than the first-generation. Its presence certainly wouldn’t overwhelm a small, home office. Maybe the sheer number of external devices you can connect to it will. Also nice: the price includes the fee for cloud-based sharing service for the life of the device.

Already own the first generation Pogoplug? No worries, as you can get the new software features as a free upgrade. You’re just stuck with the 1 USB port.Pogoplug doesn’t do anything much differently than other NAS devices except it doesn’t come with on-board storage.However, it does allow you to easily setup content and device sharing. A reader asked how Pogoplug differs from a service like LogMeIn Hamachi which provides hosted VPN and requires no specialized hardware. Both PogoPlug and LogMeIn can achieve remote access to your computer. However, for non-IT folks and home users, the idea of a VPN can be daunting. PogoPlug is effortless sharing, and is ideal for a home or small business where there is no IT presence.

Pogoplug only supports USB 2.0 and older devices and the following disk drive file systems: NTFS, FAT32, Mac OS Extended Journaled and Non-Journaled (HFS+) and EXT-2/EXT-3. The Web-based management console can be accessed via any modern browser.

Setup
The folks at Pogoplug tout how fast it is to get the device setup and they are not joking. The time to connect the device to a router, then to a 150 GB USB Verbatim external drive, powering it all up, to seeing my drive’s files on mypoloplug.com (the device’s Web-based console) took a scant 2 minutes and 19 seconds. The longest part of the setup was getting up off my chair and walking to the router.

What’s New
There really aren’t any noticeable changes in the Web-based interface since the last version. There is improved contact management. Anytime you type in an email address to send an invite to share a file, that name is automatically remembered. Such addresses make up your address book within the system. There’s no way currently to import contacts, like from Hotmail or Gmail, but perhaps that will be on Pogoplug’s roadmap.

Pogoplug next gen supports a wider range of video file types that can be streamed to other users as well as to iPhones and Android phones. Blackberry isn’t supported but Pogoplug says it’s in the works.

Pogoplug now supports automatic medic synch. You can setup one-way synch from any media source to folders on the storage devices attached to Pogoplug. It offers location independent, global search; search across any drives connected to any of your Pogoplugs—that’s right, you can run multiples Pogoplugs on your network, so you could have more than four USB storage devices to access.

A new fun, feature is the ability to create slideshows. You don’t get the bells and whistles of Microsoft PowerPoint, but creating business presentations isn’t the purpose. I quickly put together a slideshow of pictures and a video by dragging and dropping them into the slideshow creation screen and added accompanying music. Note—Pogoplug doesn’t support all media files. I had no problem with .MP3s, but could not drag and drop a Windows Media Audio (.WMA) file into my slideshow. There’s also no way to control slideshow speed.

You can opt to use the free, downloadable client to access Pogoplug rather than a Web browser. The client treats the Pogoplug as another local hard drive on your machine, accessed via Windows Explorer, even when remote. Clients are available for Windows 32- and 64-bit desktops, Mac OS X and there’s a beta version available for Linux. Of course, as mentioned in the last review, there’s a terrific client for accessing files (not just video) from your iPhone.

Security
One thing I was concerned about was security. It was a bit disconcerting to fire a device up and see my personal files pop up via the Internet, even though I had to login to the Web-based client first. There is under-the-hood security, though. Both the Web-based and desktop clients use 256-AES encryption—security that is very difficult to crack. To ensure the highest security, it’s a good idea to access the web client using https://my.pogoplug.com rather than through HTTP.

Testing
This device is really peppy. Of course, much of the performance relies on Internet connection speed, but if this were sloppily-engineered, it could slow even the fastest broadband. When I disconnected the Verbatim drive and added a USB stick, I saw the contents of the memory stick online in under 3 minutes. I got this while connected to a DSL line that’s not the fastest broadband available, either.

I reconnected the Verbatim drive and three USB memory sticks to the Pogoplug simultaneously. The device does a nice job of scanning each newly connected device and I nimbly switched back and forth between each device’s libraries in the Web client.

Big warning—make sure you eject any drive you want to physically disconnect from Pogoplug using the eject command in the interface (it’s the same eject symbol you see on DVD and Blu-Ray Players.) I pulled the Verbatim drive while “hot,” that is, without clicking the eject button and the drive got hosed. It was inaccessible through Pogoplug and through Windows Explorer. No big loss for my test equipment, and this isn’t the norm for USB devices, of course, so your mileage may vary. But consider yourself warned.

Bottom Line
This really is a neat little device. It innovates by harnessing the power and flexibility of the cloud, without having your data actually reside in the cloud. With Pogoplug, you can access and share files over the Internet but the actual data remains in your control on your storage devices. The second-generation Pogoplug performs even better than the first, and the multimedia enhancements make it of even greater value, especially if you want to share. This version is as heartily recommended as the previous, despite the ghastly colored cable stand.