Nokia N9, the charismatic smartphone with MeeGo OS is one of those gadgets that after an initial period of time conquers you irremediably thanks to its outstanding design and its fresh and different operating system.
You cannot feel a certain sadness at the thought that the N9 will get a limited release and the promising MeeGo will be placed somewhere on a shelf where it will be getting dusty.
Slim and stylish
Nokia N9 has a minimalistic casing, with a thickness of only 12 mm and a curved AMOLED ClearBlack screen of 3.9 inches, having a resolution of 854 x 480 pixels. Its colorful menu icons, displayed by the splendid screen, perfectly contrast with the black matte case.
Nokia had the kindness to include in package a case designed to protect the casing from scratches. Its casing impresses primarily by impairing the phone’s design, going almost unnoticed, which unfortunately cannot be said for many smartphones.
Fresh air
Nokia N9 uses MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, the most refined version of the operating system developed by Nokia in collaboration with Intel. For those familiar with Android’s key layout or with the iPhone’s Home key, the no-button interaction used by N9 will definitely be an interesting experience.
After using intensively the Android OS and the iOS, MeeGo seems a breeze of freshness. Vivid icons, fluid animations and a very modern look dominate the N9 operating system's interface. An example is the clock – in order to set the alarm you have to turn the two disks associated with hours and minutes.
The menu and the applications are working excellent, despite the fact that the hardware used by Nokia N9 is not very impressive. The phone has a Cortex A8 processor at 1GHz, but is helped by 1GB RAM and a GPU PowerVR SGX530. The internal memory is 16 or 64 GB.
Camera
Upon hearing the news that Nokia will launch the N9, many fans were expecting the smartphone to have an even better camera than the one on N8. Things are not quite so, the Finnish giant preferring a different approach for the N9. The phone has an 8-megapixel camera with a smaller sensor than in N8 but with the same excellent Carl Zeiss optics.
N9 also offers 720p video shooting, something not very impressive considering that we already have plenty of smartphones with 1080p. Videos are also decent, but nothing remarkable.
Camera interface is complex, providing access to a multitude of options, from setting the ISO exposure, geo-tagging, formatting or selecting one of the six different scenes.
Applications
The ecosystem of applications should be the Achilles heel for Nokia N9, taking into account the somewhat limited offer from Ovi Store, but things are not so. You will not have access to the hundreds of thousands of applications in the App Store, but you will find applications mainly covering the needs list and also some top games. You have access to dedicated applications for Facebook, Twitter, multimedia playback applications or games like Angry Birds or NFS Shift.
Nokia N9 supports a wide range of files, both office and multimedia. With the Documents application you can open text files or PDFs, while the video player supports MKVs. No shortage of navigation applications Maps and Drive or the Ovi Music service.
Nokia N9 shows those who criticized the lack of innovation of the Finnish giant that the flame has not yet been extinguished and that Nokia can still be a milestone in the mobile world. The problem is that Nokia N9 arrived a year too late, has a pretty high price and is not enjoying the deserved attention.
We will probably see phones with hardware and design similar with N9’s during the Nokia World event, but that will run Windows Phone Mango.
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