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Nokia Introduces MeeGo-Powered N9 Phone
An anonymous reader writes with news that Nokia has unveiled its first MeeGo-powered smartphone, the N9. "[T]he smartphone doesn't have any buttons on the front, with only the volume controls and a lock button located on the right side of the device. ... The performance of the prototype device felt very snappy, and it looks almost ready for retail. As a MeeGo device, the N9 will be running apps based on the Qt platform." The Washington Post calls it "the platform that could have been," referring to Nokia's decision to make the transition to Windows Phone for future devices. Others are impressed with the device, but see it as either a dead end or just another distraction to Nokia's long-term plans.
. . . is at long last finally here. Alas, it is stillborn, killed in the womb by corporate arrogance and indifference. Now, no one cares, not even me.
http://lwn.net/Articles/448590/
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Warning: This is not MeeGo
Posted Jun 21, 2011 14:48 UTC (Tue) by arjan (subscriber, #36785)
Parent article: Nokia's N9 handset launched
Despite Nokia's best efforts to confuse things, the N9 phone DOES NOT RUN MEEGO.
It runs the Harmattan OS, which isn't related to the MeeGo project at all, and is not compatible with MeeGo even.
It's very unfortunate that these mixed messages are happening, but at least at LWN we can be accurate about it.
-- Arjan who works on MeeGo
"""
The N950 was also announced with similar specs, as a keyboard-including successor to the N900. I'll laugh my ass off if the N9 takes off to the point where Nokia reconsiders going with WP7 - WP7 isn't a bad system, but a proper, complete, Linux on fast quality hardware is truly awesome.
So it's like buying an Amiga in 1994?
Looks impressive yet even on very powerful hardware it seems pretty sluggish moving around the UI. Perhaps there's room for optimisations but given this has been in development so long I would have thought it would be pretty slick by now. Certainly looks like this will be used for the really high-end phones, hopefully this will be the ideal 'geek smartphone' that they don't have to box in and dumb-down then with them also taking on WP7 it means they have a dumbed down consumer smartphone device to appease the masses too. It's a win-win.
I'm just wondering who supplied NOKIA with AMOLED screens in this device. Anyone know?
....may not have effectively "owned" Nokia like they do today (Microsoft effectively paid Nokia $1B+ to guarantee WP7 was their prime platform).
I'm not saying it's too little to late, it does look like a fantastic phone with really fluid UI. And it runs Linux without a JVM layer. Nice.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Engadget has a couple: Nokia N9 first hands on. It looks quite slick!
From the link "Nokia N9 focuses on the most important things that people do: use apps, get notifications and switch between different activities."
I hope it performs better as a phone than my WM6.5 device. My caller ID doesn't even function while the screen is locked.
The N9 and N950 are not running MeeGo, but the previously in development Harmattan, which is a continuation of the Maemo line. All of the Qt APIs in use by MeeGo as of MeeGo 1.2 are available on the platform, however, and efforts are already underway to ensure that the Community Edition of MeeGo (which is a pure MeeGo platform) is available on the N9.
The N950, sadly, will only be available in limited quantities to commercial/professional developers, with roughly 250 to be handed out to open source developers in the community. Notably, the N950 doesn't have NFC so it can't be used to develop or test NFC applications.
The N9 both is and is not an upgrade to my N900. It's lack of a hardware keyboard, lack of an SD card slot, and capacitive screen are negatives, while the faster and slightly revised omap3630 processor and 1GB of RAM are definite upsides. Additionally, most major European countries plus the US are likely going to be delayed (hopefully just delayed) for the N9 release as Nokia seems to be prioritizing them for WP7.
I will probably get one, as a minor upgrade. Hopefully the price will be reasonable.
If only media players developed by Microsoft can play music in the background on Windows Phone 7, this privileges Microsoft's music service over third-party music services. I can see how Pandora, Spotify, etc. might have grounds for antitrust complaint against Microsoft.
I don't understand bragging about having no physical buttons and how it allows more room for screen, and yet the phone still has pretty much the same amount of screen-less area as every other touch screen phone.
I think this N9 device is more about Nokia flexing it's muscles and showing that they can still compete with HTC and Apple with desirable hardware.
It does cause massive, MASSIVE confusion if you look beyond that. Currently Nokia has the following platforms: Symbian ^3, Symbian S40 (Feature phones aka dumbphones), Windows Phone 7, Maemo 5, Symbian S60 v3 and Symbian S60 v5 (aka Symbian ^1) are all forthcoming or still on sale.
Then there's MeeGo forthcoming as well as this partial implementation of MeeGo on a development only N950 as well as the production N9.
Confused yet? oh there's also a rumour of a final Maemo 6 for the N900 in addition to unsupported development releases of MeeGo for the existing N900. And you can write for ALL of these using the Qt development suite? well now that's another mess...
I had been waiting for MeeGo, but am now happily on a Palm Pre Plus. It's not completely open source but so far they really respect the homebrew community. That doesn't appear to be changing with HP now in charge.
I have longer post on it for those interested
An excerpt:
HP/Palm really deliver on openness. It’s NOT completely open source. However, they support their homebrew community, and be support I mean they have donated servers to them. All the devices I looked at (haven’t looked at the Veer) ship with the ability to go to developer mode, which really does mean typing in “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart”. Which is just awesome.. The homebrew site even has (unsupported by Palm) instructions on how to upgrade a WebOS 1.4.5 device to WebOS 2.1 (the veer os).
Part of the homebrew community is patches to change functionality. About 500 of them or so, for instance changing how the date displays, adding alarm options, and a lot more.
Oh, and Ubuntu is a supported developer environment
I don't care how hard the glass is, chances are I can fuck up any convex screen with a minor fumble.
activities on a phone are running applications, getting notifications and switching between activities. What happened to making phone calls?
QT while not my favourite API is much better than the competition. Few companies recover from a "partnership" with MSFT, Nokia started to smell funny the moment they signed the deal.
Are there any other companies making meego phones?
I don't get it. This phone looks great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
One missing things from all the demos and videos was the virtual keyboard, but part of the love i have for my N900 is for the hardware keyboard it have, The N9 is nicer to look, have more battery (even if you can't replace it), more cpu speed, harder, and a very nice user interface, but is not anymore a computer with phone capabilties, is definately a phone now. Unless the N950 becomes more available than what is announced, probably will have to move to Android or WebOS, or wait till another company fills that niche.
One would be well advised to avoid accepting favors from the Fungi from Yuggoth.
Some investor with vision, should grab the whole team, and set up a new company to build MeeGo phone, a real convergent mobile device. That way, you won't have the Nokia baggage, you don't have to fight internal politics of a giant corp, you get the excitement and energy of a new start up working on something cool, and best of all, you rid yourselves off that Elop.
Why would the average consumer buy this over Android?
Considering this is Linux, wonder how long before I can run something like Cynaogen Mod on it.
I have always loved Nokia hardware, it is better than the best, their software unfortunately makes the whole device suck. If I could get Android running on something like this, it will get real close to being a perfect phone.
Why couldn't they have released this phone with windows on it?
They wanted it to be good.
And yeah, I know Microsoft's reputation managers will mod this to oblivion, but it's true. Once you get past the flashy tiles, WP7 doesn't do anything particularly interesting, and is inconsistent/crappy about a whole bunch of things, like syncing, SD Cards, email, etc, etc.
Try one - you'll quickly understand why the few people who bought them ended up disappointed.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
For all of you Android haters that want a true Linux phone experience! Built with blessed APIs and running the latest mainline Linux kernel. This is your chance to prove us that a phone OS built using a fully open source development methods works. I am sick of going to conferences and hearing about how Android is bad for the community etc and then these same people pull out Apple iPhones. Needed to get that off my chest! :-)
I was just handed a N950, and I was wondering if anyone knows of a modding community for N9 / N950.
I recall there was an Android port for the N900, maybe someone is working on something similar?
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2032053/microsoft-paid-nokia-usd1-billion-adopt-wp7
and is inconsistent/crappy about a whole bunch of things, like syncing, SD Cards, email, etc, etc.
how so?
Just because someone spent a lot of time and effort working on something doesn't mean it's GOOD.
Hey, no reason to bring Duke Nukem into this!
It's not so much that as it takes more than just a few months to get a product through the pipeline. Right now WP7 requires a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, whereas this phone uses one from TI. This phone was probably under development long before Nokia decided to change to primarily using WP7, and it wouldn't be possible to get this phone to run WP7. It's also likely that they'd made some commitments to buying components so either they could piss off the various manufacturers of these components or they could just release the phone. Considering it's better than their current product, there's no reason at all to scrap the release.
N9 is so complete by itself (look at the list of software pre-loaded!) that who really cares that there won't be millions of rubbish apps available. There will be many apps in any case as QML-based programs will run with little or no modifications on N9 and all the latest Symbian phones.
I plan to buy two of these: blue one for me and pink for my wife.
From lurking on the Meego lists it sounds like a number of the Nokians hacking on MeeGo and Qt shifted from working on Nokia's payroll to working on Intel's payroll. I believe that some of the teams even stayed in the same cities.
Intel isn't traditionally a mobile device developer, at least not memorably, so it will be interesting to see what Intel does with their new employees. Remember that MeeGo is intended for a number of different form factors (tablet, handheld, notebook, in-vehicle, etc...), so Intel might focus more on other devices and put less emphasis on creating MeeGo smartphones.
coding is life
What is MeGo power, and how does it compare to conventional lithium-ion batteries or fuel cells in terms of capacity, longevity, recharge rate, and cost?
I watched the videos and they build a nice phone. But why oh why they always need to spoil it to use a mirror for the display? I could puke when I see the background and the lights are all mirroring on the phone. How can I use that outside in the sun where I usually would use a phone? Why they can't invest the 5$ more for an anti-glare display?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
LOL.. I find it hilarious that tin-foil nuts like you think microsoft has people modding slashdot nerds. Although its understandable that you being a anti-ms troll have a defective brain so I suppose its not entirely your fault. Jezz.. now I'm all sad.. :"(
Could be the last decent phone developed by Nokia.
Probably the will attribute its non-success to the OS instead of the fact that they clearly said that this eill be the last one.
I've been using Windows Mobile 6.x for ages and I wouldn't touch Windows Phone 7 with a barge-pole - it's off to Android for my next phone.
WM6.x was a bit ugly by default but enormously customisable and there was loads of software for it floating around as cab files of dubious legality. Also a lot of Windows applications were built for WM. I don't see that happening on WM7 which disallows native code. Only a C# API is allowed and third party applications have a crippled API. No multitasking or sockets for example. There's little chance of the people who wrote good apps for WM6.x rewriting them in C# - they've already moved to Android and or iPhone.
In a sense Microsoft are trying to go from an open but ugly platform like Android to a slick but locked down one like iOS. Mind you even iOS allows third parties to use the first class tools. On WP7 you need to have an agreement with Microsoft to do that. Adobe have one for example to implement Flash as native code. Some of the game vendors do too. In the absence of that you need to rewrite everything in C#. Most ISVs are not going to do that when there are tools that let them run their existing C/C++ code on both Android and iPhone which combined have a much larger market share than WP7. E.g. Android sold 36 million handsets last quarter. Microsoft sold 3.6 million of which 2.0 million were WM6.5 and 1.8 million were WP7.
So Opera and Mozilla have both stopped supporting Windows Mobile and won't support WP7.
WP7 is going to fail badly.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
E.g.:There's NO Bluetooth API whatsoever and you can't use the phone's accelerometer if the screen's locked.
Sthephen Elop is fired for running nokia to the ground and trying to make it into being essentially a patent bully for microsoft. I think Meego is the most promising platform, but with the disastrous decisions nokia board has made particularly in the last six months , I'm not particularly hopeful. Lets hope nokia realizes it's horrendous decisions before dissolving into oblivion.
Probably other manufacturers will jump into the meego phone platform reaping the rewards.
Once you get past the flashy tiles
Seriously? Each time I see one in the department store, I'm surprised how ugly WP7 looks. I mean it's plain white text on a blue background - it's not even an interesting font - plus some seriously old-fashioned clip art. When was the last time you've actually seen a phone that looked like this?
Maybe it's supposed to be retro and perhaps that works for some people, but then why not just go and use this here?
As has recently been shown, patents are the way for the big boys to keep the little boys down. Just look at what is happening to google.
About the only companies that could just do a new phone without needing to buy millions in patents are an IBM or a HP. Xerox would be fun... anyone who tries to patent war them will be nuked back to the stone age.
But an upstart? Forget it. Will be sued so hard, their ancestors will cry out for patent reform.
This is a real shame IMHO; I've watched the Engadet video of the device in action and I have to say that compared to iOS or Android I'm seriously underwhelmed by the Harmatten UI - the underlying OS may well be superb, but with that current interface I can't see Joe Public taking much interest.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
I have a N900 that I really enjoy, but I admit I'm less than enthused at how the platform has stagnated. I was expecting a lot more development, but with Microsoft's intrusion and Nokia mismanagement, I can't say I'm surprised. The N900 is showing its age but a lot of tweaking can help, but even MeeGo 1.2 Dev edition doesn't have everything hardwarewise working! I'd like to update to a non-Android phone, but I'm afraid that we're at a dead end. The N950 is likely out of my hands - I'm not a developer in any meaningful sense, so I'd have to pick up the N9. Hardware wise I'm liking it, though I'd like to see a newer generation dual or quad core A9. Unfortunately, from the posts here that show that Harmattan isn't even MeeGo proper suggest that like its predecessor, the software is going to be a stagnant flop for all save those who want to use it exclusively as a mobile Linux CLI, instead of a modern smartphone. As much as I like what I can do with my N900, what I can't is annoying.
The best way I can see to give the platform some staying power is enabling it to run android apps through some sort of seemless virtualization, if they won't run native? I'd love to have a little android sandbox where I could install anything from the App Market and use Layar or Google Maps Android App when I want them, without being subject to tracking all the time and whatnot, or install the Battle.Net authenticator which I know will never come in a native fashion to Maemo/MeeGo, sadly. Building the phone with this in mind would give it the chops to stand up as a "modern" smart phone in addition to being a geek toy. Otherwise, I fear it will be another footnote of incompatibility.
The problem with Meego was never likely to be the OS. Instead it's the same problem Microsoft has, the ecosystem. There simply isn't room for another mobile platform (behind iOS, Android, Win 7 Mobile, blackberry OS, and the less recognized WebOS, Symbian, and QNX). While two years ago, it was ok to just have a great mobile OS, now it is imperitive that the entire software and services ecosystem exist around that OS.
Nokia can't do it. They tried it with Symbian and OVI and failed miserably. Microsoft can do it. The combination of microsoft's OS (which I think will be even more impressive as windows 8 becomes a multi-form factor reality) and nokia's hardware as well as microsoft's money creating the ecosystem will provide a very competitive brand. One I'd expect to take 3rd in the mobile OS wars.
I do lament the loss of Meego though. I want a phone thats also a computer. Meego's promise of true linux on a phone is extremely tempting. Hell, maybe I'll find a meego phone just to be my persnoal computer. As for now, I'll stick to my Epic 4g until I see windows 8 on a phone or a VERY compelling android upgrade.
I do security
And the tiles does not feel to work well when you start having more friends, RSS/etc feeds and messages than 5-10.
If you have 10 facebook friends, 20 RSS feeds, few podcasts and you get IM and Email messages more than 2 a hour, the tiles becomes messy and cluttered. And if you add more tiles than 8, the possibility to find easily something comes harder.
I dont know about MS/Nokia fans but for me and my friends, WP7 phone have been terrible and good luck is that I did not have money to buy such at that time and I toke only 100 dollar Android phone (ZTE Blade) what is almost perfect.
bottom of screen five icons telling missed calls, new SMS's, new IM's, new Emails and web browser. Exactly same gesture possibilities as N9 was promoted (slide outside of the screen to get last used apps, home screen or all messages in one center).
Windows Phone is very great if you use it for family/friend contacts and follow few friends in facebook and so on. But for that, price is too high, better would be there 150-200 dollars.
I don't know who'll be supplying my next phone - when this current Nokia gives up it's 3-year grasp on life. but it won't be a Nokia.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Jezz doesnt care
I tried the meego on my first generation eeepc and was impressed by how quick and responsive it was. It seems to run very well on very little hardware which is ideal for a smart phone.
... I bought my wife an N900 nearly a year ago. Nowadays all she does is complain that it can't run Whatsapp or some other cool Android app. I think the N900 is the coolest phone ever, but hardware and capabilities no longer matter. All that matter is the OS and the apps available for that OS. Meego/Maemo is dead and so is any phone based on those systems.