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Nokia N9: the World's Most Underrated Smartphone?
jrepin writes "Eighteen months ago, Nokia announced a smartphone unlike any other it has produced before. It was a proper smartphone, one that looked miles away from previous Nokia phones: it was sleek, modern and simple at the same time. The hardware was pretty modern, too; no underpowered processors with severely limited RAM issues to be seen here. And, it runs on an operating system that Nokia had announced dead months before the phone's announcement. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Nokia N9."
... you can do anything at Zombo com, the only limitation is yourself...
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Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
They've ruined Nokia. I loved my N900 and was planning on buying the N9 for both my wife and I, but then they shot Meego in the head. I'm OK with Android, but really loved having full GNU/Linux/X access on my phone.
While Ubuntu has made some mis-steps, I still am greatly looking forward to running Ubuntu Phone on my Galaxy Nexus.
Interesting... Modded down when the point was to satirize the very writeup itself with the reference to the website that satirized the claims and promotions of the dotcom era...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
21 Months ago Nokia announced that my digital purchases were no longer available for me to use. This is why I never cared for the N9.
I own one, and it really is very nice. It's too bad Stephen Elop intentionally refused to have it sold in most major markets; I guess he wanted his precious WinPhones in people's pockets instead.
Where-ever it was sold however, I hear it did very well among enthusiasts such as myself. The UI has been marveled about by non-geeks when they've got to play with mine.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Because if so, it is the world's most overrated server.
John
I had a N9. Its not that great or all that is made out to be in the summary.
It is an OK phone, the screen is small but responsive. But the apps were shitty as usual and the interface is the same old Nokia.
Because they were too late, just like Ubuntu Phone OS, Jolla, Tizen, Firefox OS...
Who cares about this obvious fucking advertisement?
Fuck dice.com and their dumb corporate partners.
If it's an advertisement, it's timed rather poorly. Unless it's supposed to gin up sales on used phones.
I am not a crackpot.
According to communities dominate brands by Tomi Ahohen, the poor N9 and the outdated Symbian are expected to outsell the great savior, the Lumia Windows Phone 8 at Nokia this quarter. Not too shabby.
I would keep the N9 on my resume.
yup nokia commited suicide when they killed off meego/Maemo, i was really hoping to get this phone, and then they killed meego.... all the developers went android and nokia was left alone in a corner and had smashed its own windows(tm) ... bad choice nokia....
An advertisement for a phone you can't buy anymore? Are you taking your meds?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The N9 has actually been rated pretty highly by people that managed to get one, and it's done really well in the market for a phone that got absolutely no corporate support at all from Nokia. Elop sent it out to die, and it didn't.... which has only made the Lumia's sales performance look bad in comparison. (Not that the Lumia's sales performance needed any help to look bad.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Are they running their server on a phone? yuck yuck yuck. Seriously, Nokia, stick to making great winter tires.
... but I don't use it - I like my Lumia 920 (and 800 before that) way better than the N9. The N9 was innovative but it was buggy as hell - wifi drop outs, facebook and gtalk accounts would sign themselves off randomly, apps crashing etc. Heck the first time I turned on the phone and tried to update it via wifi it bricked due to the wifi drop out problem! Some of the problems were fixed when firmware PR1.2 came out but by that time it was no longer my daily driver, I didn't want another hack-a-thon just to get the phone to work - my reason for leaving non-Nexus Android in the first place. I *need* something that works without me having to hack something onto it.
I still keep the N9 as a monument of sorts though because it was pretty sleek - when it works properly.
link, anyone?
"No".
Chek that out, I'm amazed what they did with PureView (marketing term).
I want the time i wasted reading this post back.
I love the phone. It has some rough edges in the UI, but overall emotion = love. I have not felt that way since I got the Apple iPhone 2g. For the record I've used Android 2.3.5, 4.0 and iOS up to 4 as well.
What it does that your phone does not:
When not in a pocket or face-down it always shows the time. Always. This does not drain the battery at all.
Around the time are basic notifications - VM, facebook message, facebook notification, missed call. and there's a app for battery percentage.
My battery will last two whole days. And it completely charges in ~2 hours. Topping it off in a 1/2 ride to work in the car will keep the battery from going below 50% every day.
The swipe interface is good. You get 3 columns so swipe from the edge left/right between. Notification Feed (Facebook Twitter, RSS, etc) with weather at the top, a scrolling app icon list, and your running apps screen which shows 4 or 9 apps, which live-updates the screen. Swiping down from the top edge kills the app.
The top bar (battery indicator, WiFi, connctivity) etc is tap-able and you can change the state of what is on it. 2 taps to change your ring profile. (Android and iPhone are jarring because you have to pop to home and you have no idea if your app will be left running or killed)
All messaging services use the same messaging UI.
The phone never resets (my android did it a lot and iPhone did it occasionally)
What I don't like about it:
Some of the UI is layout less than optimally. For example in the dialer, if I bring up the number pad in-call I can't change speaker/mute without dismissing the number pad.
When reading items from my feeds list (in the application - like facebook) sometimes I get reset to the top of the list.
Lack of awesome apps. For the most part all your major services are supported by the phone and/or are free plugin download.I don't use many apps because the phone already does so much.
When calling voice mail, it shows you your voicemail number that you have to click on, rather than dialing it immediately.
What I wish:
I do wish for a dual core. it only does 720p video, and barely at that. Once in a while I'll get a force-close message but the app recovers by the time you get your finger over the button.
A better dialer UI. It's not a bad UI. It's just not "optimal".
I really like this phone and I look forward to trying Ubuntu's phone when this one dies.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Unlike an iOS5 user, I have working maps. With traffic.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I have one and have been using it. the core system is really polished and the swipe ui is fantastic.
theres also a lot of community tweaks such as rotation lock and speedup.
biggest problem is the battery lasting shorter and shorter. also the browser is somewhat lacking.
Years ago, Steve Jobs was ousted by Apple's Board of Directors. He was replaced by, John Sculley, a proper CEO. Sculley had convinced Apple that he would sell a computer like a bottle of soda. He, of course, was wrong as were the following CEOs. It was only when Apple was selling at $12 a share and Apple was dead did the board bring back Jobs, his vision for the long term and the Next OS. The rest is history.
Nokia is repeating the mistakes of Apple. The Nokia board bought into the Elop burning platform. Never mind that Nokia was on the verge of a great break through in their adoption of a Linux based OS with a world class framework, Qt, to back it. Elop doesn't have the vision or the technical prowess to pull Nokia back from destruction. He is the captain of the Valdez. His oil rig is still burning and spewing oil. Maybe, just maybe, when Nokia is all but dead and irrelevant, a technically savvy CEO with a vision will come in and turn around Nokia. Until then, the N8 was my last Nokia phone.
Meego is an excellent OS platform. Had Nokia proceeded to stay the course, the N10 would have been a must have product.
Physical Keyboard. The screen is superb, the swipe interface is the foundation of so many new mobile user interfaces, and have good memory/cpu/base OS. But the keyboard... thats what i miss from the N900, the one it have is not bad for being a touchscreen one, and you have a pretty translucent one for console in Fingerterm, but still not there. Too bad the N950 was just for (few) devels.
Anyway, could have a future, Nitdroid enables to dual boot with Android (or run natively a few android games with Apkenv), and probably will be available for it Firefox OS, Sailfish and Ubuntu mobile.
I wish it was an advertisement ... I'd buy one. They way it's looking right now, I'll probably buy a Nexus 4 if I can manage to get my hands on one. If Ubuntu gets a decent Linux phone out soon enough without screwing it up I might buy one of those.
It;s wonderful. The interface is the best that has ever been made. Sad to see innovation die with Nokia.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
When Nokia brought out the 770, also known as "the internet tablet", I bought one. It shifted paradigms, and I was very excited by it. (See Review: Nokia 770 and Second Review of Nokia 770.) For the first time ever, I could walk the planet with the internet in my pocket, so to speak.
As if the software wasn't enough, the hardware was pretty special, too. Where all of the other brands sported quarter-VGA screens, the 770 had widescreen VGA.
When Nokia brought out the N900, I bought one. It was a little faster than the 770, and had more RAM, but the main advantage (apart from more mature software) was inclusion of a GSM/3G radio, thus I only needed to carry one device, and only had one battery to keep charged. The physical keyboard was handy, too, but the N900 wasn't revolutionary like the 770.
I only recently bought an N9, and the reason I upgraded was that shoddy N900 hardware was letting me down. The USB charging port broke off the circuit board two years ago (a common problem with N900), which I was living with. But one of the magnets on the battery cover fell out, and without it the firmware wont activate the removable MMC card. I couldn't find a replacement, and despite a statutory requirement to ensure spare parts are available, Nokia claim that they don't sell them. (Blatantly illegal, and it shows how far Nokia has slid.)
The reason I resisted upgrading until now was because there was no compelling case to upgrade. The miserly 54 extra pixels down the screen was irrelevant; and the software was, as far as I could tell, very equivalent.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that Nokia squandered their lead. When everybody else had QVGA, the 770 had WVGA. But then, when everybody else put HD screens on their phones, and Apple had their beautiful Retina display, Nokia still only had WVGA. Possibly it was worse than unambitious. Possibly it was stark complacency.
Before upgrading to N9 I thought seriously about switching to Samsung Galaxy SIII — a seriously nice bit of kit — but was put off by Android which, it seems to me, is not so different than Apple's little IOS walled-garden. I like my computers to run Linux. My ADSL modem does; my Wifi AP does; my notebook does; my servers do; and my old phone did. It's the reason why I've been able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat so often, and I see no reason to give it up now. I know I can still get down to the Linux level on Android phones, but the available applications all work up at the byte-code level, and frankly, that doesn't please me.
Nokia could have recovered their lead; after all, they had Linux on their phone where everybody else had an immitation of Java (i.e. byte-code) but, no, they bought an ex-Microsoft executive who killed the product line, sacked the developers and sold off the intellectual property. In one fell swoop this man took Nokia from being king of the hill, with a highly vertically integrated product, to being an also-ran. Appearances are probably deceiving, but it does seem to be a most spectacular case of industrial sabotage.
David Newall
Just asking. I didn't even know that Nokia made a smartphone. I've seen Apple iPhones, Samsung, LG, and kyocera phones. I haven't seen a Nokia phone in ages. Come to think if it, I haven't seen a "bar" phone either.
The N9 would smash an iPhone the way the Hulk smashed Loki. Pick it up by its leg and fling into the floor, left, right, left, right, leaving iPhone-sized dents in the floor, then grunt "Puny phone" and lumber away.
Of course the iPhone, being a god, would get up, shake itself off, and go on about its business plaguing the earth.
I had the N770 and the N810. They could have used them as a base for great phones. I believe the N9 was a start in that direction. All they needed was to CONTINUE. Not scrap everything they had done, and go with MS. Luckily Google came in and showed them what could have been done.
Scott Carr
5+ years ago it was common for a phone's battery to last a week or more. I wonder, when did it become acceptable to have a device that you need to charge every (other) day?
The existence of things like the Nitdroid project and Jolla/Sailfish, plus the fact that N9 matched or possibly outsold the Lumia crud despite the massive disparity in corporate support, shows how good the technology was. The last time I saw this was...ooh it hurts to type this name...the Amiga. Commodore went under, not due to poor demand for the Amiga, which was profitable to the very end, but due to massive losses in PC clones that led them to credit default with their suppliers. They couldn't get parts to build Amigas anymore.
I hope that the prevalence of open source these days gives the keepers of the Meego flame more success then the Amigans had.
I love my N9, and since I can now pick them up used for ~$100, with 64GB flash I think my next phone will also be an N9 when this one wears out... worst decision ever by Nokia to scrap that project!
EOM
Nokia is stupid.
We are beyond Symbian. When the world left Symbian behind, Nokia just didn't get it. And they were left behind.
They then tried their own day late, dollar short version of Linux. Enormous mistake. The world left them behind. That and the $800 n-series phones. What a mistake.
Now, it's either android or ios. Nothing else is relevant. And before you say, windows phone, the dude who uses that still wears camouflage cargo shorts. Irrelevant.
They're using their grammar skills there.
HA. I can't belive that is still out there. :)
I've got an n9 and it's hands down the best phone I've ever owned. The swipe interface is awesome, and the hardware is beautiful - it won the Red Dot award after all. My only gripe is that it doesn't automatically disconnect an idle 3g connection, but the clever people at http://talk.maemo.org/ have got a decent enough workaround with profilematic. I only wish I'd be able to buy a new version in 9 months' time. I'll probably buy a Jolla / Ubuntu phone if the hardware is good enough. Given how much of a failure WP8 has been, I still think it's not too late for Nokia to change course. Bring on Meltemi.
I bought my N9 before the Nokia-Microsoft deal and have been happy with it, though disappointed that it was a product dead-end. I had an N900 before that and was happy with that too.
Nokia predicted to abandon mobile business, sell assets to Microsoft and Huawei in 2013
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The Nexus 4 seems pretty expensive for what you get... No LTE, limited storage, etc.
Typical. Passive aggressive follow up comment to your own post.
Just accept the moderation and move on with your life next time. You don't deserve rounds of kudos from strangers simply for posting. You need to earn it and your comment obviously didn't.
Personally, I have no idea what the connection is. It's possible that you're a comedy genius. It seems to me that you just made some outdated random pop culture remark and expect to get votes from people who were not in a coma in the 90's. You might as well have said "I'm Rick James, bitch".
Just how different is Tizen from meego as most developers are from the meego project.
Carriers didn't want Nokia Meego phones mainly because of [currently Microsoft] Skype. Had Nokia reconsidered their embracement and evangelism for Skype this might have been a deciding factor with the carriers you suggest as the problem.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.