Welcome to the part 10 of my Nokia N900 Review. Here, transferring data capabilities go under the microscope of the Maemo-toting powerhouse !

Transferring data :

From your old Nokia to a new one has been a piece of cake for quite some time as far as Symbian devices go and it is pretty easy with Maemo too. Infact you can now even pull in contacts from your online accounts without third party software. Simply goto contacts and you will be presented with a plethora of options as shown here.

Sadly, there's no possibility to import your old sms from other devices...(well there're some workaround that requires some technical skills to achieve the process...)

Connectivity :

All kinds of network connectivity are at the user disposal - GPRS, EDGE and 3G with HSPA. The GSM/GPRS/EDGE support is quad-band which makes the Nokia N900 capable of wordwide roaming, while the three supported 3G bands are 900, 1700 and 2100 MHz. HSDPA speed is up to 10 Mbps, while HSUPA reaches 2Mbps.

Of course, the N900 supports WLAN with a large security options including WEP, WPA-PSK and WPA with EAP (PEAP, TLS, TTLS: EAP GTC, EAP MSCHAPv2, MSCHAPv2) and has the abaltbility to automatically switch from mobile network's packet connection to WLAN once you get in its range, also, it's easily manageable through the shortcut that appears when you touch the status icons from the homescreen

There's also Bluetooth in its 2.1+EDR version with A2DP, AVRCP FTP, HFP, HSP and OPP support, the transfer speed is a little bit above most current smartphones, due probably to the writing eMMC speed (details after the break) ;)

Happily, infrared port is here (located on top of the device as showed on the pictures above) and if used for remote controlling it works at a range up to 3-4 meters !

USB 2.0 High-speed micro connector which rates the N900 at high scores when it comes to transfer speed!

Connecting the USB cable pops up a similar requester as on S60 phones asking to choose the connection mode between PC Suite (e.g. for synchronization) and Mass storage (for fast data exchange) but there's no multimedia or photo transfer mode...

As i pointed, the N900 scores the best speed transfer rates ever on any owned mobile phone !

Check out my brief demo (on windows 7) :





I was surprised ! The Nokia N900 has 32 GB eMMC (embedded storage solution with MMC interface which combines high-quality NAND Flash memory with a high-speed MultiMediaCard (MMC)) and 256 MB NAND non-removable storage.

In theory, writing speed is up to 20MB/sec and reading speed is up 37MB/sec and as demoed, i reached 17MB/sec already !


Ps : The 256 MB NAND is formatted using UBIFS. It contains the bootloader, the kernel and root filesystem.

The 32GB eMMC is split into 3 partitions:
- 768 MB of swap
- 2 GB mounted as /home (ext3).
- 25 GB of free space mounted as /home/user/MyDocs (VFAT). When the device is put in mass storage mode, this partition is the exported partition.


Backup program

That really deserves its name, is in fact not limited as with Symbian to a one backup file, but can always create more !

In case you update, don't worry, as symbian devices, the N900 supports User Data Preservation !

What's hot :

- Highest transfer speed on a device until the time i'm writing this !
- More than one way to grab and keep your data up to date
- UDP Support

What's not :

- No automatic backup schedule (daily, weekly etc) like on Symbian
- No multimedia or photo transfer mode for USB event.