I guess Jobs was wrong when it came to Nokia they were 4 years behind not 3. My first response was wow someone put an ugly cover on their iPhone, then I saw the Nokia logo and started to laugh. At least MS had the balls to try something other than a cheap UI knockoff.
I don't know why you've been down voted to oblivion, but have an up vote. :)
This thing is not even close to Android or WP7, let alone iOS. Swiping is a feature now? Really? The basis of every phone since 2007 is a great new feature?
I have Lion (dev preview) and it's very useful, but for browsers there were always ways to go fullscreen (Firefox, Chrome, etc), even my Aquamacs on Snow Leopard. Having it for everyone is even better.
"Full Screen Mode" is not really about full screen. It is an attempt to simplify the concept of virtual desktops, making it more intuitable to ordinary humans, while also putting applications or tasks into a linear arrangement so that they may be navigated more easily with multitouch gestures (task switching).
OSX Lion's fullscreen mode emphatically "is" unique. I haven't seen any other desktop OS that has a system-wide fullscreen (not maximize) button and nobody else is even in the game when it comes to bringing multitouch gestures to the desktop. The gestures are important - the entire point of Lion's fullscreen idiom is to bring the intuitiveness and immersion of post-pc apps to the desktop.
Probably for the tone of my post. The phone does look very nicely done, but that first shot with the little grid of brightly colored icons is an almost exact dup of every iPhone picture I have ever seen. They even use the exact same color and icons for phone and messages. Seriously open up Apple's and Nokia's pages side by side They really look like the same family of devices.
Beautiful hardware design, innovative user experience (borrows good stuff from Windows Phone and webOS), lots of popular built-in apps, outstanding camera, but...
...built on MeeGo, the operating system Nokia dumped for Windows. It's sad to see that Nokia's last MeeGo hurrah is on a flagship device that may never see a major update in its future.
MeeGo will live on and grow, but the N9 will be hobbled by Nokia refusing (not officially just in dribs and drabs) to provide the necessary updates (drivers and other binary blobs) that N9 owners will need to upgrade.
I'll wait and see how bad the vendor OS lockin is before considering buying what should be a device (and OS) pretty much perfect for me.
It would be an interesting situation for Nokia. First they announce that the company will be bet on Windows Phone, Symbian gets axed, and MeeGo will be put to the background. Many MeeGo developers saw the writing on the wall and abandoned the ship. Hiring them back would be difficult...
It would take Nokia two years to steer back on MeeGo, two years they can't afford; it's not going to happen. Look how long it's taking them to get a Windows Phone model out, after steering in January and committing all resources they still have...
It's a shame, without the useless Intel deal this phone could probably have hit the market last summer and could actually have had a real shot at changing things. Now it's dead in the water. After wasting my time for months on the N900, I'm not going to touch again a dead platform.
Look at Nokia's recent past to get an idea of how you cannot just swap one platform for another on a whim. It looks like flailing frmo the outside and IME creates conflict and chaos within the company.
If this is successful -- which I imagine will depend on which carriers run it and how they push it -- I think you'd see a strategy to converge the experience somewhat so there could be a natural successor to this phone.
If they are as tightly wound as it seems, it could come in the form of changes to WP7 (tho of course that application grid would have to go!).
But what's far more likely I think is a layer not unlike HTC Sense. That would be a brilliant little way to bring people on over to a strange and foreign land of WP7. And many many people i'm sure wouldn't even realize that the underlying platform is different: If their web browser, calendar, social feeds, etc, are the same, then it looks just like an upgrade.
Nokia dumped Symbian for Windows, not MeeGo (although MeeGo was also heart-broken by the announcement). If the N9 does well enough, there will certainly be more where it came from.
You had me at "I don't think Nokia's leadership thinks".
They must have known this device was in the pipeline when they made the WP7 announcement. It really doesn't seem like they gave much thought to how that would impact this (otherwise easy to get excited about) product's launch…
This is Maemo 6, renamed to Meego Harmattan. The actual "Meego for Handset" can barely make/receive calls, and Elop was right in dumping it. Blame OPK for not sticking with Maemo.
Maybe...if you could develop for it in Java and they put a lot of work into making it effortless to go from Android to their OS. At which point, you might as well just be running Android.
FFS. If your company name isn't "Apple," use Android. Availability of software is a key issue. I have no clue why anyone would want to build a completely independent and incompatible application library at this point. Buy some water pumps for Indian villages if you have that much spare money.
I don't know how they expect developers to make apps for a platform that they've publicly stated is only going to have this one phone released for.
I hope I'm wrong though, I still have an irrational fondness for Nokia hardware and the N-series (I bought and regretted every Maemo device they sold).
They have finally unified the Qt-platform for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo so it shouldn't be a problem. They also announced today that Qt will be extending to S40. Look at the new developer site http://www.developer.nokia.com/
Part of what ? They've already announced Qt won't run on WP7.
They've basically offloaded everything-but-developers to Digia [1]; and I bet Digia will have a big say in what the remaining Qt developers in Nokia will get to work on.
Qt might be part of their low-end strategy on S40, for big-numbers / low-profit emerging markets. Considering how iPhones are now immensely popular even in places like Cuba and how low-cost Android devices are getting ready to hit those markets, I bet that strategy will soon need revising as well...
Symbian will live at least to 2016. Who knows what happens during that time. They also announced that S40 will have Qt apps. They have been pretty clear about Qt's future I think. I don't know the details of the Digia deal, but I'm pretty sure Nokia can do whatever they want.
It looks likely to become MeeGo's flagship phone; they have a flagship tablet already.
I don't know about the mass-market appeal, but for my part I want an OS that actually feels like Linux under the hood, and Android doesn't. It has Linux at the core, much like OSX has BSD at the core, but it doesn't feel like Linux any more than OSX feels like BSD.
I really hope this supports ATT bands for 3G!! I've been pulling my hair out because the N900 (an awesome phone that I had the pleasure to develop for in Python + Qt at $work) only supports EDGE on ATT. I will miss the physical keyboard but I think a real (read: not resistive) touchscreen will work OK.
On the bright side, AT&T doesn't classify the N900 as a smartphone, so they don't require a smartphone data plan. :) Hopefully they'll continue to apply the same logic to the N9: "Does it run iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, or Symbian? If no, then it isn't a smartphone."
It looks beautiful and I like the more rounded icons a lot. But I wonder why the hell is Nokia launching a non-winmo device? People will not find apps for it and give it bad reviews and Nokia will end up getting even more negative publicity.
I wonder how the swipe task switching gesture interacts with games and other apps that involve swiping? I have it enabled with Dolphin (browser) and it's always a bit hit and miss whether the swipe gets picked up by the browser or as a gesture. I'm sure they can do it better than Dolphin, but still - you need it to be perfect, I think.
I love the design though - distinctive. Quite promising if they can make similarly bold designs for their phones running WP7.
In all honesty, that sounds more comfortable to my hands. One of the reasons I have never switched to iPhone 4 from the 3gs was because I never really liked how it felt in my hands without a case (I used them all day for mobile testing)
Their production processes are all about cranking out slightly-different versions of the same hardware/software combinations, as fast as possible, and market them as "new". Post-release upgrades are basically non-existent, even when bugs and problems are huge -- this was made very clear by the N97, but careful observers knew it from well before then. This phone won't have variations, the platform is commercially dead, so they'll just push it out of the door and forget about it.
Add to this that the Maemo/Meego line has historically been seen as "experimental" (i.e. by the time a device shipped, development had long moved on and backward-compatibility had been broken), even more so now that WP7 is the name of the game for Nokia, and you can see how little they'll care for this phone once they have your cash.
Yep, I know how they have been doing things. However, things like this http://www.developer.nokia.com/swipe/ux/ shows that they have done a bit of effort on this one. I don't believe they'll gain anything from cutting the support when they have come this far and actually delivered something which has selling potential in future too.
I thought this too. And then realised that if Apple were heading down the "iPhone Nano" path, a design like this would suit that device really well (albeit a little smaller). Super thin, iPod nano-like, curved screen, vibrant colour options. I wonder if any toes have been stepped on here.
This is painful to watch. Lesson learned: if you're dumping your platform to move to another, make sure there are devices built on the new platform available the day after the announcement.
This move by Nokia has stunned the Smart Phone makers, Apple , Android and RIM, its wonderful in Design, Social and Interaction.
But there is something more required for any smart phone's success story. On that front Nokia has failed everytime they have launched exclusive devices. 'CARRIERS'.
Yeah for every success story of Smart Phone, phone carriers play larger role. But Nokia always had problem in revenue sharing with Phone Carriers. So in USA and Canada where the larger mass of Mobile phone users who actually afford/buy these costly and smart devices never played with Nokia Devices.
Where in India and China, lot of local providers offer cheaper mobile phones with lot of functionalities.
I see carriers major role in success story of Nokia N9, selling unlocked phones are not preferable for customer.
Another major challenge it may face is convincing small/medium developers to start building apps for their platform.
Nokia has had problems with NORTH-AMERICAN carriers. Everywhere else, they get along with carriers much better than, say, Apple, and this was one of the reasons for their demise.
One of Jobs' great moves was to explicitly stick two fingers up at carriers and sell something CUSTOMERS wanted; Nokia was so busy making telcos happy, they started thinking customers are just a stupid herd who can be made to buy any sort of crap.
this what I eager to know too. I saw the WebTab came with a Terminal on main screen, but how about N9? Looks there will be no terminal or konsole be released officially becuz of the "simple and easy to use". and, let's look at if or not Qt will be stronger than Java.
Nokia have also made a limited edition N950 for developers [1]. The interesting differences are:
N950 is physically larger and is made out of aluminum, whereas N9 has a polycarbonate unibody. N950 has a physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The N9 is a touchscreen-only device. N950 has a different physical camera module than N9.
I love the phisical keyboard on my current phone and wish Nokia released the N950 as a consumer device.
"Further, as N950, including its device software, is not a commercial device, the quality and/feature set of N950 is of beta quality and comes without any warranty or support whatsoever."
(from release notes [1], via Engadget and MyNokiaBlog)
This seriously strikes me as "we initially thought the market would want a QWERTY slider, but we changed our tack to a full touch-only device, and now we want to unload the stock we made of the initial version".
It looks like it's a standardized dev kit. And the 250 number is for community developers. "Nokia Developer has more units for partners, champions and professional developers in general - but they are not on sale. "
Something tragic about watching the live twitter feed on their own product launch page mostly criticise this phone and MeeGo. I suppose censoring it would send a worse message.
Nokia N9 indeed great device, I classify this device in three ways:
Nokia N9 - Design, Social and Interaction
Design - Unibody Design , and no Home Button/s , Curved Shape Glass, Three colors
Social - Facebook , Twitter's OS level binding , creates a wonderful Social Experience without any efforts. Skype , Facebook chat available in built with Operating System
Interaction - Swipe gesture to access whole phone. Three states of phone Event Notifications, Applications and Current Application states maintained wonderfully
I really don't like the idea of putting all of "my social events" into one unified screen.
I actually do read all of my friend's facebook messages (and I do add only actual friends).
I think I read about 50% of the tweets of people I follow.
Adding both timelines into 1 view would make me miss a lot of "important" things
Yeha there's gotta be some easy way to see multiple views (preferably within 2 easy taps). I can't have SMS notifications lost behind 200 tweets and check-ins and wall posts from 2nd cousins looking for magic potions so they can raise alpaca's.
Fairly convincingly nice and elegant UI. It clearly owes a lot to iPhone and iOS, although that is not to suggest that it improves on iOS, and certainly not on iOS 5, although the maps do look good.
The history feature looks like a privacy nightmare. One swipe away, and someone who borrows your phone for even a moment can immediately see everything you've been up to. Where is the empathy for the user? BTW if I let someone borrow my phone, that means I have already unlocked it for them, but it doesn't mean I want them to have one-swipe access to everything.
As an aside, next time they should consider having a more likable and less arrogant-looking person do the talking, and without (apparent) overdubbing. It came off as slightly creepy.
I'd love to play with one, but I don't expect it to make any dent in iPhone. I am curious what other cool features it has that didn't make it into the video... since it's Nokia, we can expect a lot, so they do have my attention at least temporarily.
So you'd basically want Nokia to make UI harder to use just because of those rare cases when someone borrows his phone to the person he/she doesn't trust?
The right response to that increasingly common problem, over-exposing yourself by lending a computer/phone, is to have a restricted "not the owner" mode. Crippling the owner's interface/abilities all the time instead of properly dealing with the truth that phones are not purely single-user devices is a strange denial of reality.
When you talk about privacy, are you referring to the recent app list? Doesn't everything phone do this in multitasking? iPhone shows recent apps with a double tap, Android with a long press, WebOS with cards...
I'm not sure if I buy this whole "swiping" is the most important feature. Did you guys watch the video with the SVP of design talking? He talks about how swiping eliminates the need for a home key (jab at Apple), and how later you can swip to show all your active apps "making for the best multitasking experience" (another jab at Apple)... I wasn't convinced.
116 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadLooks to be pretty incredible HW and UI paired with Linux goodness.
Better intro showing main features live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LffDQHp5E0
This thing is not even close to Android or WP7, let alone iOS. Swiping is a feature now? Really? The basis of every phone since 2007 is a great new feature?
Sigh. :)
...built on MeeGo, the operating system Nokia dumped for Windows. It's sad to see that Nokia's last MeeGo hurrah is on a flagship device that may never see a major update in its future.
I'll wait and see how bad the vendor OS lockin is before considering buying what should be a device (and OS) pretty much perfect for me.
the problems are all management not technology... which is sad because those eggs in the meego basket are looking pretty cool.
It's a shame, without the useless Intel deal this phone could probably have hit the market last summer and could actually have had a real shot at changing things. Now it's dead in the water. After wasting my time for months on the N900, I'm not going to touch again a dead platform.
If this is successful -- which I imagine will depend on which carriers run it and how they push it -- I think you'd see a strategy to converge the experience somewhat so there could be a natural successor to this phone.
If they are as tightly wound as it seems, it could come in the form of changes to WP7 (tho of course that application grid would have to go!).
But what's far more likely I think is a layer not unlike HTC Sense. That would be a brilliant little way to bring people on over to a strange and foreign land of WP7. And many many people i'm sure wouldn't even realize that the underlying platform is different: If their web browser, calendar, social feeds, etc, are the same, then it looks just like an upgrade.
They must have known this device was in the pipeline when they made the WP7 announcement. It really doesn't seem like they gave much thought to how that would impact this (otherwise easy to get excited about) product's launch…
FFS. If your company name isn't "Apple," use Android. Availability of software is a key issue. I have no clue why anyone would want to build a completely independent and incompatible application library at this point. Buy some water pumps for Indian villages if you have that much spare money.
I don't know how they expect developers to make apps for a platform that they've publicly stated is only going to have this one phone released for.
I hope I'm wrong though, I still have an irrational fondness for Nokia hardware and the N-series (I bought and regretted every Maemo device they sold).
They've basically offloaded everything-but-developers to Digia [1]; and I bet Digia will have a big say in what the remaining Qt developers in Nokia will get to work on.
Qt might be part of their low-end strategy on S40, for big-numbers / low-profit emerging markets. Considering how iPhones are now immensely popular even in places like Cuba and how low-cost Android devices are getting ready to hit those markets, I bet that strategy will soon need revising as well...
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/07/nokia-sells-qt-licensing-...
Nokia's new developer site shows pretty clearly their main focuses http://www.developer.nokia.com/
They won't put all bets on WP.
I don't know about the mass-market appeal, but for my part I want an OS that actually feels like Linux under the hood, and Android doesn't. It has Linux at the core, much like OSX has BSD at the core, but it doesn't feel like Linux any more than OSX feels like BSD.
edit: It does indeed support ATT 3G bands (850 and 1900 MHz): http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/11/nokia-n9-hits-the-fcc-pac...
http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-n9-00/sp...
I love the design though - distinctive. Quite promising if they can make similarly bold designs for their phones running WP7.
N9 - 12.1 mm [1]
iPhone4 - 9.3 mm [2]
[1] http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-n9/speci...
[2] http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
iP4: 9.3-9.3 mm
[1] http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjb9E5A2ls
That is, this will be their one and only Meego phone, and they want to "get feedback [for] inclusion in their [WP7 phones]".
This looks like a great phone and OS, and I would actually buy it if Nokia were going to support it.
But they just don't get it, do they?
Their production processes are all about cranking out slightly-different versions of the same hardware/software combinations, as fast as possible, and market them as "new". Post-release upgrades are basically non-existent, even when bugs and problems are huge -- this was made very clear by the N97, but careful observers knew it from well before then. This phone won't have variations, the platform is commercially dead, so they'll just push it out of the door and forget about it.
Add to this that the Maemo/Meego line has historically been seen as "experimental" (i.e. by the time a device shipped, development had long moved on and backward-compatibility had been broken), even more so now that WP7 is the name of the game for Nokia, and you can see how little they'll care for this phone once they have your cash.
Bye, Nokia, it was great knowing you.
But there is something more required for any smart phone's success story. On that front Nokia has failed everytime they have launched exclusive devices. 'CARRIERS'.
Yeah for every success story of Smart Phone, phone carriers play larger role. But Nokia always had problem in revenue sharing with Phone Carriers. So in USA and Canada where the larger mass of Mobile phone users who actually afford/buy these costly and smart devices never played with Nokia Devices.
Where in India and China, lot of local providers offer cheaper mobile phones with lot of functionalities.
I see carriers major role in success story of Nokia N9, selling unlocked phones are not preferable for customer.
Another major challenge it may face is convincing small/medium developers to start building apps for their platform.
The specs look pretty good but as a flagship device from Nokia, I was hoping for an HDMI port, MicroSD card slot and FM transmitter.
When I look at this phone I think of the famous quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupry:
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Good work Nokia for not designing a phone by committee.
[1] http://forum.meego.com/showpost.php?p=22819&postcount=12
Doesn't anyone remember this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSZssHGR-Qg
N950 is physically larger and is made out of aluminum, whereas N9 has a polycarbonate unibody. N950 has a physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The N9 is a touchscreen-only device. N950 has a different physical camera module than N9.
I love the phisical keyboard on my current phone and wish Nokia released the N950 as a consumer device.
[1] http://www.developer.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/3744886f...
(from release notes [1], via Engadget and MyNokiaBlog)
This seriously strikes me as "we initially thought the market would want a QWERTY slider, but we changed our tack to a full touch-only device, and now we want to unload the stock we made of the initial version".
[1] http://www.developer.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/3744886f...
Design - Unibody Design , and no Home Button/s , Curved Shape Glass, Three colors
Social - Facebook , Twitter's OS level binding , creates a wonderful Social Experience without any efforts. Skype , Facebook chat available in built with Operating System
Interaction - Swipe gesture to access whole phone. Three states of phone Event Notifications, Applications and Current Application states maintained wonderfully
Adding both timelines into 1 view would make me miss a lot of "important" things
The history feature looks like a privacy nightmare. One swipe away, and someone who borrows your phone for even a moment can immediately see everything you've been up to. Where is the empathy for the user? BTW if I let someone borrow my phone, that means I have already unlocked it for them, but it doesn't mean I want them to have one-swipe access to everything.
As an aside, next time they should consider having a more likable and less arrogant-looking person do the talking, and without (apparent) overdubbing. It came off as slightly creepy.
I'd love to play with one, but I don't expect it to make any dent in iPhone. I am curious what other cool features it has that didn't make it into the video... since it's Nokia, we can expect a lot, so they do have my attention at least temporarily.
Trust isn't binary.
He doesn't want "instant everything reveal" when someone (a friend? work colleague?) uses his phone.