Thoughts on Nokia N9

Yesterday Nokia unveiled the Nokia N9, a MeeGo powered smartphone that will be available later this year.

Let us remind ourselves of some of the specs: 3.9-inch display (854 x 480), MeeGo 1.2, 1GHz processor, polycarbonate unibody design, MicroSIM, 1GB RAM, 16 or 64GB storage, NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-FI, 3G, 8-megapixel wide-angle camera with f2.2 max aperture, 16:9 720p HD video with stereo sound, and more.

From holding and operating the N9 for a few minutes yesterday and today I can say this is a very cool smartphone. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever tried because of the unibody made out of polycarbonate and how the display just sits in the body.

 

The body is made out of one solid piece of polycarbonate, a sort of plastic with matte finish, and the internal components sit behind the display. There is no door on the back, which you open to get to battery and SIM card, it’s just the display. The polycarbonate is also solid in terms of color, which is part of the material through and through. This means the color isn’t just a thin layer on top so if you scratch the N9 a bit, even in the scratch it should be the same color.

The display fits seamlessly with the body in a manner I’ve not experienced before and the N9 feels very thin and light to hold, despite the 3.9-inch display. A Nokia representative told me that they had done research on the best size of the screen and they found that 3.9 was the largest size most people could use when holding the device with just one hand.

The display has very rich colors, fast response time, great touch feeling and should match the best in the market right now. I did not try it outside in sunlight but hopefully it will perform well there as well.

NFC (Near Field Communications) is not something new although Nokia seems to apply it to new and exciting things. I saw how a user just by touching N9 to a headset or speakers paired the two so they could start interacting using Bluetooth. This clearly shows NFC is not just for payments, although that’s where the main application still lies.

The big question I think is how does the N9 fit in with Nokia’s future strategy when it has clearly stated that Windows Phone 7 is its chosen platform for smartphones. And with N9 launching just months before we’re due to see the first Nokias running WinPhone, what’s the future path for MeeGo and Nokia?

We may find out more October 26 when Nokia World kicks off in London.

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop said yesterday that what we now see in N9, like the materials, the manufacturing process, the design and the interface, are all things we’ll see in future Nokia devices. I don’t think he ever said MeeGo devices though, so there is even a possibility that the N9 is the first and only MeeGo device. I really hope that’s not the case as, from what I’ve seen so far, MeeGo has plenty of promise as a smartphone operating system. How it will fit in with the rest of Nokia’s offerings is a bit hard to see though. If Nokia keeps MeeGo around it will be offering mobile devices with three operating systems. Since an argument for tying up with Microsoft in the first place was so that Nokia could innovate faster and get better products out quicker, keeping MeeGo while also going WinPhone doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Availability of apps is of course an issue, as it already is with Symbian. Qt is the development platform for Symbian as well as MeeGo, so presumably it won’t take developers that much work to turn a Symbian 3 app into a MeeGo app. Just how much- or little- work it will take we’re still not sure of. And it would seem that to really attract customers’ attention Nokia needs to go beyond its current Ovi Store offerings and expand on them. That way, users will have a greater range of choice and more likely to find high quality apps for their N9 smartphones.

Finally, price will of course also matter but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking this will be cheap by any means. I don’t think Nokia has confirmed anything but from what I hear a range of €400-500 seems likely, with 16GB and 64GB models on offer. That seems expensive to me but if the N9 is considered cool and hip enough when it goes on sale, there will be plenty of people who will buy it anyway.