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Tag: meego

  • Nokia N9, Love at Second Sight

    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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  • Nokia and Intel Build Joint Research Center

    Intel, Nokia and the University of Oulu officially opened the Intel and Nokia Joint Innovation Center. It will employ about two dozen R&D professionals and become the latest member of Intel’s European Research Network.

    According to the companies, initially the lab will conduct research for “new and compelling mobile user experiences that could leverage the rapidly increasing capabilities of mobile devices.” They claim that creating interfaces that are more similar to interactions in the real world can enable experiences that are more natural and intuitive, in the same way that modern games and movies are more immersive through the use of realistic 3-D graphics.

    The new lab is aligned with the MeeGo open source platform recently launched by Intel and Nokia.

    "The University of Oulu’s focus on future telecommunications solutions as well as electronics and photonics made it the perfect location for the Intel and Nokia Joint Innovation Center," says Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer and director of Intel Labs.

    Another potential area of research could look into technologies that allow displaying a 3-D hologram of the person you are talking to on the phone, a capability only found in science fiction movies today. Consumers will feel more involved and engaged with their mobile experience than with current methods, as the companies claim.

    "3-D technology could change the way we use our mobile devices and make our experiences with them much more immersive," said Rich Green, Senior vice president and chief technical officer, Nokia. "Our new joint laboratory with Intel draws on the Oulu research community’s 3-D interface expertise, and over time will lay down some important foundations for future mobile experiences."

    The lab will be located at the Center for Internet Excellence at the University of Oulu, and will work closely with the Oulu Urban Living Labs, which provide a unique environment for sensor research, testing and piloting technological and social innovations.

    The Intel and Nokia Joint Innovation Center follows a successful industry and academia collaboration model similar to the ones of Intel Labs Barcelona and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain, the Intel Visual Computing Institute and the Saarland University in Germany or Intel Labs Berkeley at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States.