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Sunday, October 23, 2011

Nokia N9 - Meego powered handset - First thoughts

The Meego OS packing Nokia N9 design is a sight for the sore eyes. Its brilliant poly carbonate uni body design is as good as a phone design can get. The impeccable build quality means only one thing. Its from Nokia. As a former user of the Nokia N900 which initially ran on Maemo, i was very excited to see the N9 running on Meego. I have to mention that the N900 itself had an option of installing Meego on it if you are a little enterprising. But time never was enough for me to do it.

Hardware :

The body is made from a single block of Poly carbonate material, machined to produce the required form. It is not cast from plastic as is normally is the case. Due to this manufacturing process the body looks flawless without any imperfections or any openings.

There aren't many physical buttons either. Not that you would miss them. The OS is designed from the ground up to not use too many physical buttons. To the right you have the volume rocker and the power lock button. On the left side there are no physical buttons. Bottom a grill opening for the speakers and on the top hidden well designed doors which hide the HDMI port, power/USB connectors and the SIM card slot. The micro SD card also fits to the slot. The top of the phone also has a standard 3.5mm audio connector. All very brilliantly though of.

The phone also comes with all the standard issue sensors: a proximity sensor, accelerometer, ambient light sensor for automatic brightness adjustments and a magnetometer a.k.a compass for proper map orientations in GPS based turn by turn navigation using Ovi maps.

Nokia N9 Commercial :







Display :


The phone features a slightly curved screen which aids in the swipe motion. The edges of the screen blend seamlessly in into the body of the phone.
The 3.9-inch FWVGA (854x480) AMOLED display  is a gorgeous one rendering perfect black and comparable to other top notch mobile AMOLED screens. The screen contrast is so good that you cannot make out the difference where the screen ends and the black uni body poly carbonate shell begins.

Processor:



Its is powered by a single-core 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU aided by a PowerVR SGX530 GPU. Though not as beefy as the current generation processors are, Engadget reports that with 1 GB RAM, the spec is more than enough for a very fluid OS experience. This also means better battery life and lesser recharges

Camera:
The camera is 8 megapixel sensor one with Carl Zeiss lens capable of F2.2 and continuous auto focus. This again means one thing. Brilliant photos. It can record 720p video with continuous auto focus.

Software:
The basic UI design is based on three different screens. The application grid, the notification center and the multitasking app view scree. The video below would explain the navigation and design better.










The OS looks very promising and could have been a great asset to Nokia if it had been properly patronized and developed.

Online presence:
The phone has excellent integration with online chat and social media services. It lets you set your availability in one go for all the services or for individual services. All the chat messages and other notifications are presented in a single chat window making "staying connected" effortless.

NFC:
With the integrated NFC hardware near field transactions like tapping on Nokia Play 360° speakers to play music, or share photos by tapping on a picture frame sharing videos, contacts and more by tapping another NFC-enabled devices will be an innovative feature.
Conclusion:
Brilliant, careful and usability centric hardware design. The processor that gets the job done, without eating up battery life. A gorgeous AMOLED display , NFC, 8 MP Carl Zeiss equipped camera. A unique very much usable new OS design. Sounds like the perfect combination.

All said it is sad that this will be the last MEEGO phone ever to be produced by Nokia. Nokia surely has made a wrong decision in abandoning Meego as their choice operating system for their smart phone systems. As an already dead and done smart phone platform this does not stand a chance against the mighty Android and iOS giants, but would make a nice collectors item for the techie in you.

Please let us know what you think about this in the comments below.

2 comments:

  1. Best OS ever. iOS can go to hell

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