Updated: Nokia’s Flagship Smartphone N900 Sales Fail to Impress

ESPOO, Finland – Research firm Gartner reports that less than 100 000 units of the Nokia N900 smartphone were sold in its first five weeks in the market, a bad signal for the Finnish giant’s Maemo line.

The Nokia N900 is a high-end smartphone made especially for technology enthusiasts: it’s large, heavy, but contains top-end features, placing it at the top of the mobile technology market.

The handset also came as an alternative to the S60 line, which comprised of buggy smartphones, with user interfaces not tweaked for touchscreens. With the N900, a touchscreen-equipped phone, Nokia was looking to counter the threats from Apple and BlackBerry, although that clearly was not successful.

The N900 is the first and last Maemo 5-based smartphone, as Nokia has partnered up with Intel to produce MeeGo, a platform based on both Maemo and Moblin mobile operating systems, also based on Linux, and supported officially by the Linux Foundation. Although Nokia will not officially port MeeGo to the N900, hackers have found a way to port the current version of the platform to the N900.

Support from Nokia for the N900 has been weak as well, with a firmware upgrade only released recently, but a feature much-requested from users, voice guidance for GPS, is still not available.

The Nokia N900 has a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, a 3.5″ touchscreen display, 32GB internal memory with support for expansion through a microSD slot, HSDPA connectivity, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a kickstand for multimedia functions, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a futuristic user interface.

UPDATE-1: Unlike what the source suggested, the N900 sold 100 000 units in the first five weeks, and not months. This changes the outlook, although still quite low in comparison to its rivals.