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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
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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.
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.
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Engadget has a couple: Nokia N9 first hands on. It looks quite slick!
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.
Exactly; you can buy one and be insufferable for the next 5 years about things your friends' phones can just now do that you've been doing for years.
(And I can joke about it, because I'll be getting an N950 if at all possible, and probably an N9 as well.)
My hope is Symbian for dumbphones, WP7 for most smartphones and Maemo/Meego for the highend linux touchscreen computer phones. That allows Nokia to just continue support at the low end, not have to worry about the software side of the larger smartphone market and to be able to focus on pushing highend devices with their own platform that should appeal to power users.
activities on a phone are running applications, getting notifications and switching between activities. What happened to making phone calls?
I don't get it. This phone looks great.
Meego seem to be going in the opposite direction of android: from netbooks and tablets to phones. The initial example devices of Meego included an Aava phone, but is not one of the main phone manufacturers companies as far i know.
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.
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 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! :-)
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!
Mmm, did you two even look at the videos? 1) It's not sluggish. 2) It doesn't look much like anything you've seen. "Oh but Nokia software is always poor, so this software must be poor as well!" Sorry, but that's the argument of a retard. The software looks great (from the few hands-on videos posted by various, not only Nokia's own), and Android's only obvious advantage is the huge market for apps.
Your wife will have an affair with someone who'll get her an iPhone.
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;
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;
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.