In November 2009, Nokia release its Maemo powered N900. The Nokia N900 has a cult following in the tech community but the phone never caught on with the mass market. Maemo was based on the Debian Linux distribution. Meego was first announced at Mobile World Congress in February 2010 by Intel and Nokia in a joint press conference. Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo were merged into one new common project call MeeGo. According to Intel, MeeGo was developed because Microsoft did not offer comprehensive Windows 7 support for the Atom processor.
We have seen a few MeeGo powered netbooks, and if you want to try MeeGo for netbooks, it is a free download.
Now, you have it on a Mobile phone. The Nokia N9.
Nokia Press Release:
SINGAPORE – At the Nokia Connection event in Singapore today, Nokia introduced the Nokia N9, the first-ever pure touch smartphone that is all about making things simpler. Nokia N9 focuses on the most important things that people do: use apps, get notifications and switch between different activities. Navigating the UI is done with a simple gesture, a swipe of a finger. Let’s have a closer look at what the Nokia N9 is bringing to the game.
SWIPE
The team behind the MeeGo-based Nokia N9 brought together elements of industrial design, software development and user interface advancements, as well as a developer platform to create a better way to use a phone. All that’s needed to use the Nokia N9 is a simple gesture, a swipe of the finger. It is an intuitive way to use all the different features and functions. Whenever you are in an application, you just swipe from the edge of the screen to go back home.
UNIBODY DESIGN
The Nokia N9 has a beautiful one-piece, unibody design where the hardware and software fit together seamlessly. The large, 3.9 inch curved glass AMOLED display lets the applications shine and take full benefit of the user interface. Thanks to the innovative laminated display technology, it looks like applications are literally floating on top of the screen. The body of the Nokia N9 is made from the best in polycarbonate material engineering today, enabling superior antenna performance over most other competitors’ smartphones. This means better reception, better voice quality and fewer dropped calls. The Nokia N9 comes in three colours: black, cyan and magenta and with large storage capacities of 16GB and 64GB on the two variants to be made available.
NO BUTTONS
The Nokia N9 is the world’s first pure touch screen phone without any front-facing buttons at all. You unlock the phone by just double-tapping the screen.
THREE HOME VIEWS
The user interface in Nokia N9 is designed around the things people typically use the most. This is why there are three recognizable home views arranged in a carousel: 1) Applications for launching and organizing your apps. 2) Events for social networking feeds and notifications for calls, texts, calendar events, etc. 3) Open applications for switching between all live apps you have used recently. You can pinch and zoom the screen to see either four or nine open app icons. In fact, the Nokia N9 delivers the best multitasking experience on any phone!
POWERFUL CAMERA
The 8MP auto focus camera with Carl Zeiss optics, dual LED flash and super wide 28mm lens works faster from start to capture than any other manufacturer’s smartphone camera in the market. HD video and true 16:9 resolution photos are supported. You can share your photos via MMS, email, NFC and many online services including Flickr and Facebook.
FAST WEB BROWSER
The fast web browser is built on the latest Webkit 2 technology. Even while loading a web page, the screen remains responsive. You can have several browser windows open in the open applications view and switching between them is, again, fast and easy. Favourite websites are shown as visual thumbnails, supported by a full browsing history. Wide HTML5 support offers access to rich web applications and fast video playback.
LATEST MAPS
The Nokia N9 has the latest Nokia Maps with free, voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation for walking and driving. There is also a dedicated Drive app for in-car navigation, which lets you start navigating to your destination instantly after entering your destination. Public transport routing in 85 cities means you can find the quickest route on foot or by tram, metro or train. You can also discover nearby places with cafés, shops, hotels and more, all marked along the way.
DOLBY SOUND
Dolby Headphone and Dolby Digital Plus support on the Nokia N9 turns regular stereo audio into personal surround sound on any headphones – first on any mobile phone.
NFC-ENABLED
Pairing between NFC-enabled accessories is easier than ever before – you do Bluetooth pairing only once and after that you can connect to them just by touching. You can also share content like photos or business cards via NFC.
The things that make the Nokia N9 unique – the industrial design, developments in software and user interface, and the ease of developer experience with Qt – will live on in a variety of ways in Nokia. You can go and experience the Nokia N9 for yourself at swipe.nokia.com. The site is full of interactive videos that show how the product works in real life – it is the second best thing to actually having the product in your hand! The Nokia N9 will be in stores later this year, with availability and local pricing to be announced closer to the sales start date.
I do not want to comment on the N9's software. I have not seen it yet. The hardware is promising.
A 3.9-inch 480 x 854 AMOLED screen, 16/64 GB of internal storage, 1 GB of RAM, a 8 MP Carl Zeiss optics autofocus camera with a dual LED flash, HDMI out... What we are surprised about is that it runs on a 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU, PowerVR SGX530 GPU, TI OMAP 3630 chipset. We were kind of expecting an Atom inside.
With Nokia firmly behind Windows Phone 7, and its Meego phone not running an Intel processor I do not know where this new branch in Nokia smartphone development is headed. We will watch with interest.
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