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As you might guess for a phone with 32GB of onboard memory (with up to 32GB more through microSD) the N900 is clearly designed for media, and it's pretty good too.
The media player is a simple affair, with the options to listen to music, watch videos, use internet radio or quickly shuffle all your songs the main icons thrust at you when started up.
Music is probably the main reason you'll pull out the media player on the phone, with the tracks listed nicely and viewed by album cover when you start up. There's no cover flow option here, but seeing as every phone other than the iPhone that tries this struggles terribly, we're not sure that's really a bad thing after all.
Music quality is pretty good too, with tracks starting promptly and having a little sparkle to them as well. We're fans of the music interface, as it has dual modes - there's the slider to let you navigate through the song, with basic track info, and if you tap the album artwork it takes you back to the track list of the album you're listening to.
Beyond that, it's pretty basic - there's play and stop and fast forward and all those gubbins, as well as another volume slider (on top of the physical key on the phone) and despite the fact they could be a bit bigger, it works well.
As you can imagine on the N900, video looks superb on the WVGA screen, and is also simple to navigate, supporting WMV, RealVideo, MP4, AVI, Xvid and DivX codecs, although it can't seem to recognise the M4V file format for some reason.
Video does take a little bit of time to load up on occasion, and there were instances where the phone juddered a bit when beginning a movie.
But whether listening through the headphones or speakers, the sound was more than adequate (although not stellar) and there's also the option to share the video through Bluetooth, email and via built-in services like Flickr (although we couldn't find YouTube support anywhere, which was thoroughly odd. Ovi by Nokia is there, but we're only interested in the big names for a phone like this).
Internet radio was a real damp squib in our eyes, as not only did the 46 listed stations not work over 3G barely at all (we accidentally started one up once and that was it) it's nigh on impossible for the average user to add a radio station to the list unless their favourite site has express instructions on how to do it and the specific URL, and we couldn't once manage to find that.
It's a real shame, as an easy-to-use FM transmitter is included as standard, and we like the thought of pumping internet radio out in the car (as long as we have a good data plan and an understanding provider).
But the main saving grace is DLNA. Savour those letters - D. L. N. A. Before, they stood for a real diabolical time trying to get your sodding phone to connect to your sodding computer, with the likes of the Samsung i8910HD refusing to accept there's any such thing in the room even though it's RIGHT THERE, WHY CAN'T YOU SEE IT?
Nothing like that with the N900 though - simply turn on your PC (which needs to be part of your home network - Windows 7 does this automatically for you) and then lo and behold, an option to connect to that PC appears at the bottom. In the words of a popular mammal: simples.
However, there's one really annoying issue – pop in a memory card and the Nokia N900 will simply refuse to read the files on there until a restart, and even then it can sometimes still ignore them. This is really frustrating if you're trying to quickly pop a new album onto the phone, as you don't want to have to keep messing around with switching on and off and changing things around just to do so.
