Nokia Announces the MeeGo Laden N9

At the Nokia Connection event underway at Singapore, Nokia has finally taken covers off its newest N-Series handset, the Nokia N9. Unlike most of its predecessors (barring the Maemo laden N900 of course) this one runs MeeGo, an OS that Nokia had said it has given up on. Anyway, it is strange to see Nokia happily launching new phones based on OS’es that they themselves have said wouldn’t be the primary focus (which of course is Windows Phone 7)

Lets get back to the N9 now. The phone is quite a looker with some design cues coming in from the erstwhile Symbian based handset, the X6. You will notice that the front fascia of the N9 is completely devoid of any buttons. The only way to communicate with the phone is through the screen (there are buttons on the sides though). Even unlocking the phone is done by double tapping the screen. Neat! The N9 also boasts of a Unibody design and claims to offer better antenna performance than most of its competitors – obviously taking a dig at Apple’s iPhone 4.

If you have been used to Symbian, you should realize that Nokia has had an issue with User Interfaces. Symbian was blamed for its clunky unintuitive UI. But then for a decade old OS, it was decent. With MeeGo, Nokia had a fresh attempt at designing a fresh UI from the scratch. At first glance, the UI does have some similarity to the new Symbian Anna UI that you might have seen on the Nokia E6 and the X7 – both of which have been recently launched. As of now, the device runs MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. The phone also gets a decent web browser which should do a better job than the ones found on Symbian these days. The browser is based on Webkit 2 and is compliant with HTML 5. Like Apple, Nokia too has given flash a miss, it seems.

Let’s turn our attention to the hardware now. Unlike Symbian which didn’t require fancy processors and tons of RAM just to do web browsing, MeeGo is a totally different beast. It was evident that Nokia will have to use faster, meaner hardware on the N9 so that it can offer decent performance – and at first glance, that exactly seem to be what they have done. The processor inside this one is an ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP3630 clocked at 1 Ghz. It is mated to the PowerVRSGX530 graphics chip. The phone also gets 1GB of RAM! That, by Nokia and Symbian standards is uber fast!

To put things in to perspective, the Samsung Galaxy S II gets a GB of RAM while the HTC Sensation manages to romp home with just 768 MB. The phone is also possibly the first Nokia phone with an NFC chip built in. The phone would apparently be available in two versions a 16GB one and a 64 GB version. There seems to be no option for a microSD card for expanding the built in memory. Note that this phone also like the iPhone 4 uses a micro SIM.  The N9 tips the scales at 135 grams which I should say is quite okay. The display on the phone is of a non-conventional size. It measures 3.9 inches across and has a resolution of 854*480 pixels which puts it in the league of most Android handsets out there. Being AMOLED in nature, you can be sure of a phone with a vibrant display. Connectivity options include Bluetooth (2.1), Wi-Fi a/b/g/n and USB.

The phone gets an 8 megapixel camera at the rear with Carl Zeiss optics and is also capable of HD video recording – though Nokia hasn’t told us if it’s full 1080p or just 720p recording. The device also gets dedicated camera and volume buttons on the sides. This is good for folks who do not particularly fancy touching the screen while taking images.

Nokia hasn’t clarified as to when the Nokia would go on sale globally although we do expect that to happen in the not too distant future. There is doubt if this one will make it to India soon because as of now, the India isn’t even listed in the countries where you will have the option to be notified in the event of a launch.

As of now, we aren’t sure what Nokia plans to do with MeeGo once they start churning out Windows Phone based devices later this year. Nokia might have to do a lot of explaining to its users to tell them why they should buy a phone that Nokia doesn’t see as its main priority.