PUSHing the Nokia N900

LONDON, England � This weekend, at the onedotzero festival, Nokia announced a new initiative dubbed PUSH N900. It�s all about hacking, and the push (we assume) refers to pushing the N900 beyond your own expectations. We�ve already shown how the N900 was used to manipulate a projected image at the festival, and the folks from Tinker.it and Hyper spent Sunday afternoon showing off some projects they�ve already created with the aid of the N900. But PUSH N900 isn�t just any old gesture, it�s a bone fide competition where hackers, designers and creative types can submit their ideas, the winners bagging funding, support and kit to make them happen. Once the ideas are reality, they�ll be put on show in Nokia Flagship stores around the world.

Unveiled at the weekend were four very cool, albeit wacky uses for an N900. Like using a sledgehammer for a pin, they pretty much all provided an over engineered solution for problems that didn�t really exist. But that wasn�t the point. 80s gadgets were the inspiration and starting with a Speak and Spell, and some Arduino circuitry, the team managed to use the eighties toy to send a text message to a member of the gathered throng (using the N900, of course). Next up a Rolodex which identified a contact�s details and pulled them up on the N900, along with a View-Master which was used, together with the phone�s camera, to create 3D images. Oh, and that�s not to forget the radio hack which helped the device identify music from the 80s.

We talked a little about open source hardware last week, following our visit to the open source talk at onedotzero. PUSH N900 takes that whole ideal on a stage further and I think we�re going to see an array of very cool ideas come to life over the coming months. It�s one thing the N900 being a Linux-based device. It�s a whole other issue when we discover what that might actually mean. Excited? You bet!