Beautiful hardware design, innovative user experience (borrows good stuff from Windows Phone and webOS), lots of popular built-in apps, outstanding camera, but...
...built on MeeGo, the operating system Nokia dumped for Windows. It's sad to see that Nokia's last MeeGo hurrah is on a flagship device that may never see a major update in its future.
This is Maemo 6, renamed to Meego Harmattan. The actual "Meego for Handset" can barely make/receive calls, and Elop was right in dumping it. Blame OPK for not sticking with Maemo.
MeeGo will live on and grow, but the N9 will be hobbled by Nokia refusing (not officially just in dribs and drabs) to provide the necessary updates (drivers and other binary blobs) that N9 owners will need to upgrade.
I'll wait and see how bad the vendor OS lockin is before considering buying what should be a device (and OS) pretty much perfect for me.
Nokia dumped Symbian for Windows, not MeeGo (although MeeGo was also heart-broken by the announcement). If the N9 does well enough, there will certainly be more where it came from.
You had me at "I don't think Nokia's leadership thinks".
They must have known this device was in the pipeline when they made the WP7 announcement. It really doesn't seem like they gave much thought to how that would impact this (otherwise easy to get excited about) product's launch…
It's not necessarily a bad idea to take on Android and iOS as distinct challenges. Splitting resources is a necessary duty; it should be done in an appropriate way.
It would take Nokia two years to steer back on MeeGo, two years they can't afford; it's not going to happen. Look how long it's taking them to get a Windows Phone model out, after steering in January and committing all resources they still have...
It's a shame, without the useless Intel deal this phone could probably have hit the market last summer and could actually have had a real shot at changing things. Now it's dead in the water. After wasting my time for months on the N900, I'm not going to touch again a dead platform.
Look at Nokia's recent past to get an idea of how you cannot just swap one platform for another on a whim. It looks like flailing frmo the outside and IME creates conflict and chaos within the company.
If this is successful -- which I imagine will depend on which carriers run it and how they push it -- I think you'd see a strategy to converge the experience somewhat so there could be a natural successor to this phone.
If they are as tightly wound as it seems, it could come in the form of changes to WP7 (tho of course that application grid would have to go!).
But what's far more likely I think is a layer not unlike HTC Sense. That would be a brilliant little way to bring people on over to a strange and foreign land of WP7. And many many people i'm sure wouldn't even realize that the underlying platform is different: If their web browser, calendar, social feeds, etc, are the same, then it looks just like an upgrade.
It would be an interesting situation for Nokia. First they announce that the company will be bet on Windows Phone, Symbian gets axed, and MeeGo will be put to the background. Many MeeGo developers saw the writing on the wall and abandoned the ship. Hiring them back would be difficult...
Even when Microsoft debuted WP7, my feeling was that UI prettiness was "where the puck is" and not "where it's going". In 2011, a phone with a pretty touchscreen UI and a bunch of basic apps is more "where the puck was". Even if we assume the software runs as smoothly in the demonstrations (a level of trust that Nokia's last few flagships have not warranted), there's little that would impress an iPhone 3GS user 2 years ago.
A pretty phone does not put you in the game anymore. It's staggering how behind this is compared to the competition, who have advanced tablet ecosystems, deeply integrated video-calling and messaging, deep cloud services, massive application libraries, extensive content (magazines and books), powerful video/photo/audio editing...
This is painful to watch. Lesson learned: if you're dumping your platform to move to another, make sure there are devices built on the new platform available the day after the announcement.
Nokia have also made a limited edition N950 for developers [1]. The interesting differences are:
N950 is physically larger and is made out of aluminum, whereas N9 has a polycarbonate unibody. N950 has a physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The N9 is a touchscreen-only device. N950 has a different physical camera module than N9.
I love the phisical keyboard on my current phone and wish Nokia released the N950 as a consumer device.
It looks like it's a standardized dev kit. And the 250 number is for community developers. "Nokia Developer has more units for partners, champions and professional developers in general - but they are not on sale. "
The video featuring Nokia's SVP of design really fascinates me. He introduces the idea of using touch swipes as something really revolutionary, that "changes our perception of how we use technology". I'm sure it really would have been revolutionary, four years ago. Before Windows Phone 7, before Android, before WebOS and before iPhone.
Of course, it's just a marketing video. But the idea of using touch swipes to navigate around your smartphone is not even a little bit revolutionary in 2011. It's not new, fresh, remarkable or special in any way. It kind of makes Nokia look like they were born yesterday; enamored and fascinated with what they think is "new" technology.
I'm left wondering if what we're seeing in this marketing video is not what Nokia wants us to think about their new product, but how much of a dinosaur Nokia really is.
True. FaceTime was touted as a big innovation, when my classmates used video phones back in 2003. I also went to university with a deaf and mute girl who used it to communicate with her friends in sign language.
The video cinematography was a bit too Apple-inspired for my taste, though, but at least it looked professional. Not used to seeing that, at least from competitors.
I'm not talking about the hyperbole itself, I'm talking about how they're hyping something everybody else thinks of as common already.
FaceTime would have been kind of like that if everybody had been making video phone calls every day since four years ago. Most people had never made a single video phone call, most people still haven't.
Using touch swipes on their phone though, everybody has, every day, for years. Outside of Nokia, that is.
I disagree. What Nokia is solving here is true buttonless navigation. No one else is using swiping in that way. However everyone is trying to go buttonless. Android has done it in the easiest way, replacing hardware with software buttons and calling them not-buttons. It has been rumored that iOS will go buttonless too, but who knows how. WebOS is the only that has kind of done this. You can navigate WebOS without buttons but it still has a "button" in the gesture area that most people use anyways. Swipe is the first time someone has been able to make the OS buttonless in a way that doesn't feel tacked on. Calling that revolutionary is hyperbole, but it is an important UI development for where we are inevitably going.
I think that using swipe as the main (almost exclusive) way to navigate around the phone's functions is indeed, well, not revolutionary, but (at least to some extent) innovative and yes, also "new, fresh, remarkable". Sure, UI borrows some ideas from WinMo7, maybe from webOS too, but it's still much fresher than, say, Android.
Swipes are not revolutionary, but using them as the main way to navigate through the UI is innovative, making the N9 not need any buttons for navigation.
Seems there are at least 2 people who find pithy comments not worthy here so let me expand upon the point in a more verbose way to please them:
If you're Nokia you have zero chance at capturing imaginations with your products the way Apple does. There is no novel approach their corporate marketing team can come up with that will rival the winning formula Apple has produced. Apple's marketing today is probably better suited to the market than even the Think Different campaign in 1984.
Moreover, Apple has made their bones by contrasting themselves against beige corporate culture. Nokia is very beige.
Apple has framed the debate on their terms. So Nokia can choose to flail around in a mediocre attempt to find a different marketing strategy that works.... Or they can copy the unrivaled, unrelenting market leader. They are trying to produce a cool, trendy, powerful little smartphone. Why not embrace the Apple formula as best as you can. You're playing on their turf, so try to present yourself the way they do.
Or, in other words, when in Rome do as the Romans do.
First of all, I dont think the analogy is apt. Also, your claim that Apple seems to be setting terms is not true at all. Android has captured a big market share and from what I read last time it was more than Apple.
I also think that if you can come up with a phone that adds 'significantly' more value than an existing phone, it will automatically capture attention. You dont need imitate the current players in the market.
There have been many examples in the past ( for eg: Google search Vs Yahoo search ).
But I do think that Nokia phone is really pretty, with pretty good UI features showcased. But I am not sure if it has the necessary qualities to make users switch from an existing iphone or android phone. I dont know if it adds "significantly" move value!
Of course switching between search engines is a lot easier than switching between phones, so that is also an important factor.
Fairly convincingly nice and elegant UI. It clearly owes a lot to iPhone and iOS, although that is not to suggest that it improves on iOS, and certainly not on iOS 5, although the maps do look good.
The history feature looks like a privacy nightmare. One swipe away, and someone who borrows your phone for even a moment can immediately see everything you've been up to. Where is the empathy for the user? BTW if I let someone borrow my phone, that means I have already unlocked it for them, but it doesn't mean I want them to have one-swipe access to everything.
As an aside, next time they should consider having a more likable and less arrogant-looking person do the talking, and without (apparent) overdubbing. It came off as slightly creepy.
I'd love to play with one, but I don't expect it to make any dent in iPhone. I am curious what other cool features it has that didn't make it into the video... since it's Nokia, we can expect a lot, so they do have my attention at least temporarily.
So you'd basically want Nokia to make UI harder to use just because of those rare cases when someone borrows his phone to the person he/she doesn't trust?
The right response to that increasingly common problem, over-exposing yourself by lending a computer/phone, is to have a restricted "not the owner" mode. Crippling the owner's interface/abilities all the time instead of properly dealing with the truth that phones are not purely single-user devices is a strange denial of reality.
When you talk about privacy, are you referring to the recent app list? Doesn't everything phone do this in multitasking? iPhone shows recent apps with a double tap, Android with a long press, WebOS with cards...
I really don't like the idea of putting all of "my social events" into one unified screen.
I actually do read all of my friend's facebook messages (and I do add only actual friends).
I think I read about 50% of the tweets of people I follow.
Adding both timelines into 1 view would make me miss a lot of "important" things
Yeha there's gotta be some easy way to see multiple views (preferably within 2 easy taps). I can't have SMS notifications lost behind 200 tweets and check-ins and wall posts from 2nd cousins looking for magic potions so they can raise alpaca's.
This is not relevant to the OP at all, but I don't see any way to do private messages in Hacker News, so... A while ago you commented on one of my essays and I didn't respond: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2479738
As for your point about building character - I didn't see much of that in my sister when I was selling boxes with her or in her troop, I don't know how one would measure this one way or the other, and I don't think I actually criticized the cookie-selling practice at all, since the focus was on the price and whether money was being wasted by the organization. (Likewise, I don't follow your point about advertising. Walmart isn't exactly raking in all its profits and underselling Girl Scouts by auctioning off the advertising space on the sides of its cookie boxes.)
It looks beautiful and I like the more rounded icons a lot. But I wonder why the hell is Nokia launching a non-winmo device? People will not find apps for it and give it bad reviews and Nokia will end up getting even more negative publicity.
Their production processes are all about cranking out slightly-different versions of the same hardware/software combinations, as fast as possible, and market them as "new". Post-release upgrades are basically non-existent, even when bugs and problems are huge -- this was made very clear by the N97, but careful observers knew it from well before then. This phone won't have variations, the platform is commercially dead, so they'll just push it out of the door and forget about it.
Add to this that the Maemo/Meego line has historically been seen as "experimental" (i.e. by the time a device shipped, development had long moved on and backward-compatibility had been broken), even more so now that WP7 is the name of the game for Nokia, and you can see how little they'll care for this phone once they have your cash.
Yep, I know how they have been doing things. However, things like this http://www.developer.nokia.com/swipe/ux/ shows that they have done a bit of effort on this one. I don't believe they'll gain anything from cutting the support when they have come this far and actually delivered something which has selling potential in future too.
I don't know how they expect developers to make apps for a platform that they've publicly stated is only going to have this one phone released for.
I hope I'm wrong though, I still have an irrational fondness for Nokia hardware and the N-series (I bought and regretted every Maemo device they sold).
They have finally unified the Qt-platform for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo so it shouldn't be a problem. They also announced today that Qt will be extending to S40. Look at the new developer site http://www.developer.nokia.com/
Part of what ? They've already announced Qt won't run on WP7.
They've basically offloaded everything-but-developers to Digia [1]; and I bet Digia will have a big say in what the remaining Qt developers in Nokia will get to work on.
Qt might be part of their low-end strategy on S40, for big-numbers / low-profit emerging markets. Considering how iPhones are now immensely popular even in places like Cuba and how low-cost Android devices are getting ready to hit those markets, I bet that strategy will soon need revising as well...
Symbian will live at least to 2016. Who knows what happens during that time. They also announced that S40 will have Qt apps. They have been pretty clear about Qt's future I think. I don't know the details of the Digia deal, but I'm pretty sure Nokia can do whatever they want.
It looks likely to become MeeGo's flagship phone; they have a flagship tablet already.
I don't know about the mass-market appeal, but for my part I want an OS that actually feels like Linux under the hood, and Android doesn't. It has Linux at the core, much like OSX has BSD at the core, but it doesn't feel like Linux any more than OSX feels like BSD.
Maybe...if you could develop for it in Java and they put a lot of work into making it effortless to go from Android to their OS. At which point, you might as well just be running Android.
FFS. If your company name isn't "Apple," use Android. Availability of software is a key issue. I have no clue why anyone would want to build a completely independent and incompatible application library at this point. Buy some water pumps for Indian villages if you have that much spare money.
this what I eager to know too. I saw the WebTab came with a Terminal on main screen, but how about N9? Looks there will be no terminal or konsole be released officially becuz of the "simple and easy to use". and, let's look at if or not Qt will be stronger than Java.
I really hope this supports ATT bands for 3G!! I've been pulling my hair out because the N900 (an awesome phone that I had the pleasure to develop for in Python + Qt at $work) only supports EDGE on ATT. I will miss the physical keyboard but I think a real (read: not resistive) touchscreen will work OK.
On the bright side, AT&T doesn't classify the N900 as a smartphone, so they don't require a smartphone data plan. :) Hopefully they'll continue to apply the same logic to the N9: "Does it run iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, or Symbian? If no, then it isn't a smartphone."
Nokia N9 indeed great device, I classify this device in three ways:
Nokia N9 - Design, Social and Interaction
Design - Unibody Design , and no Home Button/s , Curved Shape Glass, Three colors
Social - Facebook , Twitter's OS level binding , creates a wonderful Social Experience without any efforts. Skype , Facebook chat available in built with Operating System
Interaction - Swipe gesture to access whole phone. Three states of phone Event Notifications, Applications and Current Application states maintained wonderfully
I wonder how the swipe task switching gesture interacts with games and other apps that involve swiping? I have it enabled with Dolphin (browser) and it's always a bit hit and miss whether the swipe gets picked up by the browser or as a gesture. I'm sure they can do it better than Dolphin, but still - you need it to be perfect, I think.
I love the design though - distinctive. Quite promising if they can make similarly bold designs for their phones running WP7.
I thought this too. And then realised that if Apple were heading down the "iPhone Nano" path, a design like this would suit that device really well (albeit a little smaller). Super thin, iPod nano-like, curved screen, vibrant colour options. I wonder if any toes have been stepped on here.
Does anyone have experience with getting hardware from their developer program? I'd like to own and develop for the next-gen MeeGo device and I hear the N950 (N9 dev device) has a physical keyboard which I would love.
Something tragic about watching the live twitter feed on their own product launch page mostly criticise this phone and MeeGo. I suppose censoring it would send a worse message.
I'm not sure if I buy this whole "swiping" is the most important feature. Did you guys watch the video with the SVP of design talking? He talks about how swiping eliminates the need for a home key (jab at Apple), and how later you can swip to show all your active apps "making for the best multitasking experience" (another jab at Apple)... I wasn't convinced.
In all honesty, that sounds more comfortable to my hands. One of the reasons I have never switched to iPhone 4 from the 3gs was because I never really liked how it felt in my hands without a case (I used them all day for mobile testing)
I guess Jobs was wrong when it came to Nokia they were 4 years behind not 3. My first response was wow someone put an ugly cover on their iPhone, then I saw the Nokia logo and started to laugh. At least MS had the balls to try something other than a cheap UI knockoff.
I don't know why you've been down voted to oblivion, but have an up vote. :)
This thing is not even close to Android or WP7, let alone iOS. Swiping is a feature now? Really? The basis of every phone since 2007 is a great new feature?
"Full Screen Mode" is not really about full screen. It is an attempt to simplify the concept of virtual desktops, making it more intuitable to ordinary humans, while also putting applications or tasks into a linear arrangement so that they may be navigated more easily with multitouch gestures (task switching).
I have Lion (dev preview) and it's very useful, but for browsers there were always ways to go fullscreen (Firefox, Chrome, etc), even my Aquamacs on Snow Leopard. Having it for everyone is even better.
OSX Lion's fullscreen mode emphatically "is" unique. I haven't seen any other desktop OS that has a system-wide fullscreen (not maximize) button and nobody else is even in the game when it comes to bringing multitouch gestures to the desktop. The gestures are important - the entire point of Lion's fullscreen idiom is to bring the intuitiveness and immersion of post-pc apps to the desktop.
Probably for the tone of my post. The phone does look very nicely done, but that first shot with the little grid of brightly colored icons is an almost exact dup of every iPhone picture I have ever seen. They even use the exact same color and icons for phone and messages. Seriously open up Apple's and Nokia's pages side by side They really look like the same family of devices.
This move by Nokia has stunned the Smart Phone makers, Apple , Android and RIM, its wonderful in Design, Social and Interaction.
But there is something more required for any smart phone's success story. On that front Nokia has failed everytime they have launched exclusive devices. 'CARRIERS'.
Yeah for every success story of Smart Phone, phone carriers play larger role. But Nokia always had problem in revenue sharing with Phone Carriers. So in USA and Canada where the larger mass of Mobile phone users who actually afford/buy these costly and smart devices never played with Nokia Devices.
Where in India and China, lot of local providers offer cheaper mobile phones with lot of functionalities.
I see carriers major role in success story of Nokia N9, selling unlocked phones are not preferable for customer.
Another major challenge it may face is convincing small/medium developers to start building apps for their platform.
Nokia has had problems with NORTH-AMERICAN carriers. Everywhere else, they get along with carriers much better than, say, Apple, and this was one of the reasons for their demise.
One of Jobs' great moves was to explicitly stick two fingers up at carriers and sell something CUSTOMERS wanted; Nokia was so busy making telcos happy, they started thinking customers are just a stupid herd who can be made to buy any sort of crap.
...built on MeeGo, the operating system Nokia dumped for Windows. It's sad to see that Nokia's last MeeGo hurrah is on a flagship device that may never see a major update in its future.