The status area

Somebody asked me about easy access to wlan, bluetooth, alarms and so forth, so I decided to describe them in more detail.

They all reside in what is known as the status area (at the very top of the screenshot below).

Left from the time (01:25), the icons are:

• Alarm active
• Connected to 3G with "ok" reception
• Battery level
• Wlan active
• Green ball indicates I have instant messaging accounts logged on. Exclamation mark means there was an error logging in to at least one of them (in my case MSN, since I am logged on from my desktop)
• GPS active
• Cpu load monitors that are virtually impossible to read. One is cpu, the other is memory, so what... I'm using one dot of cpu and two dots of memory. Whopee.

When you press the status bar, you get a "status window" that looks roughly like this:

• To set your alarms, you simply click Clock & Alarms.
• To turn on (or off) your wlan or 3g, you click Internet connection, which lists all your Internet Connections (for me my home Wlan and Sonera Finland mobile). You then click a connection to toggle it on or off. Very easy!
• The box that says "availability" is my status on instant messengers (Skype, Google talk, MSN). The exclamation mark indicates an error. 
• Because I have my GPS on, it knows I'm in Vantaa and advertises that to my IM buddies. I could have it say what street I'm on, but I don't want people to know where I am all the time!
• The webcam is the control button for the forward facing webcam. The webcam-button, which doesn't work yet, is supposed to start a screencast recording and not the forward facing webcam, as I previously thought. It should be noted that right now, there aren't any video chat -capable apps on the market, but we are sure to see some soon! (There IS however a mirror app available, that allows you to see yourself through the forward facing webcam if you want to style your hair and are all out of reflective surfaces!). 
• The column on the right has the volume level at the top. Slide it to change master volume.
• To change profiles, click the profile button. The N900 only has two profiles: Silent and General. If you want more, tough luck, because that's just not possible right now. Maybe with a future update?
• Bluetooth can be toggled easily.
• Location services (A-GPS) can be toggled.
• The bottom one is interesting. The status-window is run by a plugin architecture and this last control with blue squares isn't part of the stock N900 experience. I added it from the Application Manager. It's simply a backlight control and I'm running level 3 / 5 right now. Change backlight level simply by clicking one of the five squares.

So, there you have it. Tons of useful controls at your fingertips. Couldn't be easier! This is actually one of those things that I don't notice, because it works so well. I am not missing anything, except for a numerical percentage indicator for battery charge. I want to know exact numbers when I have only 3% left!