With a colourful flourish, Nokia has shown off its upcoming N9: the world's first-ever "pure touch" (buttonless) smartphone... but also likely the only MeeGo from Nokia you'll see.
Nokia's in a tricky position these days. It's still the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, but in terms of significant growth areas (ie. smartphones) it's caught in a rather awkward spot, and this year will see the company straddling releases across three distinct operating systems.
First, there's Symbian^3, the latest iteration of Nokia's traditional smartphone OS, slated for ongoing appearances on a number of handsets in 2011 and due for a substantial "Anna" update next month.
At first glance the N9's curved body and bright colours are reminiscent of yesteryear's iPod mini and nano.
Then there's Windows Phone 7, Symbian's successor and the soon-to-be primary smartphone OS for Nokia handsets, after the company announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft earlier in the year.
And last (and unfortunately probably least) there's MeeGo: sandwiched between the other two, MeeGo is an open source Linux project co-founded by backers Intel and Nokia in 2010. It was envisaged to be a major platform for Nokia smartphones going forward, but now that Nokia's sided with WP7, its future is not particularly clear.
The N9 offers WVGA (854 x 480) resolution and Dolby Digital Plus decoding.
Which brings us to the N9, which Nokia showed off today in a sneak-preview event in Sydney. It's the first MeeGo device to be released by Nokia (and likely to be the only one, although this hasn't been confirmed).
Despite Nokia's seeming difficulties with pinning down a platform, one thing you can't generally fault are its handsets, and the N9 APC played with today is a sexy case in point.
The N9 sports a sleek curved frame with a 3.9-inch AMOLED screen (which runs virtually all the way to the device's smooth edge) reinforced with scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass. The body is a one-piece polycarbonate chassis and houses a 1GHz ARM CPU with 1GB RAM, a 1450mAh battery and packs an 8MP camera plus NFC for pairing with assorted Bluetooth accessories.
The N9 will be available at launch in cyan (16GB) or black (16/64GB), although a magenta version will also be released further down the track. Strangely, there's no microSD slot, so you're stuck with built-in storage only.
The multi-tasking home screen provides a neat view of what's running on your system.
Nokia's marketing the N9 as the first-ever "pure touch" smartphone, which is a fancy way of a saying that there's no front-display buttons (although there are buttons on the side for volume and locking/unlocking). This puts more emphasis on gesture-based control for basic navigation, namely with a swipe control to switch between running apps.
MeeGo itself resembles a somewhat streamlined Android interface. On the N9 implementation, there's only three screens. The central home screen displays all your apps (which can be organised as you like, but sadly there's no folder on widget support). Swipe to the left and you've got a feeds and notifications screen, while the right reveals a neat multi-tasking page, which shows a macro grid view of whatever apps you've got running.
All up MeeGo on the N9 seems to offer a spritely interface, and with time we think it could be quite intuitive in use, but we were definitely left with the impression (based on only a few minutes with the unit) that the N9 is more of a fashion phone than a power user's device.
That's a lotta apps: we're puzzled by the lack of folder support. If you're a heavy app downloader, expect to do a lot of scrolling.
Which is fine. Nokia's promoting the N9 on its looks, simplicity and ease of use, so it's a fair bet this mid-year MeeGo effort isn't being primed with an Android-killing brief. Come end of year and WP7 though...
The N9 is due for release with carriers in Australia in Q3 (expect "August-ish" we were told) and pricing has not yet been announced.