Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power - Benito Mussolini
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Nokia introduces the N9 smartphone
FINNISH PHONE MAKER Nokia has announced its latest smartphone, the N9 that runs the Meego operating system.
The N9 is Nokia's handset that follows its earlier N8. Nokia has vaguely said it will release the N9 "later this year". In a departure from the N8, it ditches the traditional home button for an all screen design.
Marko Ahtisaari, head of design at Nokia said, "With the Nokia N9, we wanted to design a better way to use a phone. We reinvented the home key with a simple gesture: a swipe from the edge of the screen."
With the home button gone a swipe gesture from the edge of the screen will take you to the home screen. There are three new home screens consisting of events, applications and open applications.
Because there is no physical home button the N9 has a larger 3.9in AMOLED screen than its predecessor. The glass is curved Gorilla glass with anti-glare polarisation. The chassis design pushes the screen as close to the edges of the uni-body construction as possible.
The camera is one of the main focuses on the handset with an 8MP Carl Zeiss wide-angle lens capable of shooting HD video, although from the looks of it there is no dedicated camera button. For music lovers there is Dolby Digital Plus decoding along with Dolby Digital post-processing technology.
You're unlikely to run out of storage space as the N9 comes in both 16GB and 64GB options, with 1GB of RAM. The handset is powered by a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor.
Near Field Communication technology makes an appearance and there's also a dedicated Drive app for navigation.
The N9 runs the Meego 1.2 operating system, since Nokia's Windows Phone 7 handsets are not due to arrive until later this year. As well as the N9, Nokia has also announced three Symbian handsets.
These are the affordable Nokia C2-02, C2-03 and C2-06. These low cost Nokia phones offer internet, maps and messaging with a choice of touchscreen or keypad. The C2-03 offers dual-SIM capabilities.
Nokia said that these three mobiles are expected to tip up in the third quarter of this year and will cost between €75 and €80. Watch the video below to see the Nokia N9 put through its paces. µ
Tags: Hardware
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Android Applications can run on the Nokia N9, via Alien Dalvik, promising native performance with minimum repackaging of the original Android App. All the hardware capabilities are accessible to the repackaged Android App, and any further tweaking that may be necessary for 100% compatibility can be done via the Android SDK, which Myriad will provide later this year.
At a single stroke, future owners of the Nokia N9 running on the Meego Harmattan 1.2 platform will potentially have access to more applications than Android phones, a staggering notion, considering that the Android Apps market was already growing at a rate faster than Apple iPhone Apps by February of 2011 and recent numbers from Hugo Barra, Product Management Director of Android in May 2011 showed that there are 200,000 Android Apps available.
Compare this with the 300,000 over iPhone Apps available as of now.
Add the current 48,000 Ovi store Apps as of June 2011 to the continued growth of the Android Apps market, it is likely that at the point-in-time of the retail release of the N9 worldwide, owners will have access to more Smartphone Apps than the iPhone!!!
A truly shocking thought, especially when the number of Apps available for end-users have been the strongest selling point for any Smartphone device to date.
The fact is it is more likely that WP7 will be stillbirth. Despite having 36,000 registered developers as of March 2011, there are only 11,500 WP7 Apps. This means less than 33% of developers who actually PAID money to register, actually developed anything for WP7. Just goes to show how much confidence the mobile App Developer Community for the Smartphone market have in WP7.
So much so that one reviewer wondered aloud why Nokia would want to cast its lot with Windows when it already has a potential iOS killer in terms of user-interface, an “ecosystem” that it can control with QT developers dying to get their hands on developing apps in-house in the production stages.
It is baffling how Elop has been forced to launch the very handset that can get him fired from his position as the CEO of Nokia.
In a yet another surprising turn of events in the Nokia N9 saga, Nokia has officially declared continued support for the Nokia N9 and Meego Harmattan 1.2 platform after the soon expected retail release worldwide.
See the tweet below from the Nokia’s Head of Portfolio Management:
http://twitter.com/#!/klasstrom
If they price this competitively, it might win some die hard Nokia fans out there. But it needs apps developers support as well. Meego looks better than WP7...