Nokia N900 Multitasking Demo: How to Multitask on Maemo 5

So I've been playing with my Nokia N900 for a little more than two weeks now -- I believe that's quite enough time for any tech blogger to know if a phone is worth recommending or not. And I'm gonna tell like it is now (not that I haven't said it before): TechPinas highly recommends Nokia N900. Get it, TP friend. It's worth every penny.

Here's the first of my series of review posts on the device.




Really, there's a of things to love about the N900 -- the incredibly solid construction, the sophisticated 'clapping' sound that you hear when you use the slide mechanism to reveal or hide the keypad, the powerful yet easy-to-use Maemo 5 operating system, the fingerprint-resistant back case, the very responsive resistive touchscreen (more about this later), the 5 megapixel camera; the list goes on and on. But one feature that I find very useful and totally amazing about this smartphone is the efficient way it handles multitasking.

Multitasking, in a gadget sense, is the apparent simultaneous performance of two or more tasks on a smartphone or computer's operating system and CPU. Simply put, it's doing many things at the same time on a computing device.

Of course, there are other smartphones that can do this (iPhone 3Gs not included, mind you) but the way that Maemo 5 on Nokia N900 does it makes you feel that you are actually working on a computer right at the very palm of your hands, literally. Multitasking on N900 is just way smooth, efficient and organized.

Here's a video that I recorded showing you how easy it is to multitask on Nokia N900. It doesn't have my voice explaining what's happening as it's pretty much self-explanatory:



Angry Birds! I love that game! When birds go angry, you're going down.


How to multitask on the Maemo 5 operating system of Nokia N900?
(click photos to enlarge)

1. On the desktop, choose the first app you want to open:



2. For the sake of illustration, let's choose Web app and go to Twitter:



3. Study the parts of the app page. At the bottom right, you will see a square icon with arrow inside pointing  northwest (yellow circle), clicking on this will launch or hide the header menu bar. On the extreme left of the menu bar, you will see the tabbed apps icon (red circle); Clicking on this will bring you to the Open Apps page.



4. The Open Apps page shows all apps that you are running on the phone. Since Twitter via Web app is all we're running right now, the only thing we have here is the minimized version of that page. To return to the desktop and choose another app to run, you just need to click anywhere on the vacant space. Alternatively, you may click on the grid-like icon at the upper left corner of the screen to go to the Installed Apps page.



5. Let's say we click on the vacant space and go back to the desktop. Here we can choose another app to run. Let's choose Angry Birds game (bottom row, second icon from the right). Clicking on the icon, launches the app.

Nokia N900 features multiple desktops (up to 4), here's another one aside from the 1st desktop I showed you in step 1.

Notice that on the upper left corner of the game page, we still have the Tabbed Open Apps icon. Clicking on this will take us back to the Open Apps page.



6. We now have two open apps running at the same time on our Nokia N900 -- The Web App and the Angry Birds Game. Clicking on either minimized screens will maximize it; Note that both minimized screens are dynamic, showing what's happening on the app page in real-time.



7. Here's how the Open Apps page will look like if we also open the Images and Email Apps. 
Still looks neat and organized, don't you think? And yes, it can run even more apps; I've tried running 8 apps all the same time with no noticeable lags in performance.



8. And if you're wondering, all apps' pages have that Tabbed Open Apps icon located at the far left of the header. Again, clicking on it will take you back to the Open Apps page where you can jump from one app to another.




Multitasking on Nokia N900? Totally easy and efficient, if you ask me. :)

Get yourself a Nokia N900 now! I highly recommend it. It's now out at all authorized Nokia outlets nationwide with a suggested retail price of Php 29,990.


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