Nokia Introduces New MeeGo Phone: the N9

Nokia has delivered on its promise to release at least one MeeGo phone, unveiling the N9 at Nokia Connection 2011 in Singapore. The device comes in three colors — black, cyan and magenta — has a polycarbonate unibody chassis and a 3.9-inch curved glass Active Matrix OLED screen.

Since the device has no front-facing buttons, the user interface focuses on swiping. From any app, it takes only a swipe from the edge to return to the home screen. You can also swipe to switch between the three home views: notifications and feeds, apps grid and open apps/multitasking.

Double-tapping the screen will wake the phone from idle, and swiping the wallpaper across will unlock it.

The N9 is equipped with an 8-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, boasting a wide-angle lens, large lens aperture and dual LED flash. Like most high-end smartphones, it captures HD videos too.

Processing power is decent with its 1GHz Cortex A8 processor and 1GB RAM. On-board storage comes in two flavors, 16GB and 64GB, and is expandable up to another 32GB with a microSD card.

Other goodies: near field communication (NFC), free turn-by-turn navigation by Nokia Maps, and Dolby Sound. It’s also the first non-Apple device that takes microSIM.

Pricing is unknown at this point, but it should hit stores by the end of 2011.

Being so well-designed (from the looks of it, at least), it’s a shame that the N9 may be the last ever MeeGo by Nokia. Featuring a dead-on-arrival operating system, or a “burning platform,” as Nokia CEO Stephen Elop puts it, the N9 won’t get the love it deserves from both developers and users.

The N9 is probably a reassurance from Nokia that it can still make cool phones, and future Windows Phone 7 devices from the Finnish company probably wouldn’t disappoint.

Source: Nokia Conversations