Most new top of the range mobile phones claim to be the equivalent a home PC with all the major interfaces scaled down to fit into your pocket. The truth is that while a lot of these individual functions do equate to their PC counterparts, there are usually only a select few that work to a high standard - and at the cost of other applications. You might have an in-built music player but a lousy wi-fi connection, or vice versa.
Nokia hopes to change all that by unveiling the first mobile phone to work to a PC standard across the board, on all applications. Nokia are boasting that their N900 is just as powerful as a home computer, yet is a fraction of the size. (Even if that's true, won't you get serious eye strain from staring at such a tiny screen all day? It would be plainly sacrilegious to watch a film like Star Wars on it).
Still, watching movies on a phone isn't really a priority for potential buyers. What counts is the strength of the operating system - in this case the Maemo 5 Linux, based upon the T1 OMAP microprocessor with ARM Cortex-A8 core. The N900 is the first Maemo software device to include quad-band GSM and 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) functionality. This basically means it has a more touch-friendly interface than, say, the N810 internet tablet that preceded it.
Since the N900 uses Adobe Flash 9.4 it's now powerful and flexible enough to allow all its devices to work in conjunction with each other. Some of the featured applications are: A portable media player, 3.5 inch resistive touchscreen capable of displaying 16 million colours, slide-out 3-row backlit keyboard, autonomous GPS, 5 mega-pixel camera with 3x zoom and 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio options (photos are also GPS tagged for reference) and a storage capacity of 32GB that can potentially be raised to 64GB.