Nokia N9
swipe.nokia.com
swipe.nokia.com
...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…
A pretty phone does not put you in the game anymore. It's staggering how behind this is compared to the competition, who have advanced tablet ecosystems, deeply integrated video-calling and messaging, deep cloud services, massive application libraries, extensive content (magazines and books), powerful video/photo/audio editing...
Bye, Nokia, it was great knowing you.
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...
Of course, it's just a marketing video. But the idea of using touch swipes to navigate around your smartphone is not even a little bit revolutionary in 2011. It's not new, fresh, remarkable or special in any way. It kind of makes Nokia look like they were born yesterday; enamored and fascinated with what they think is "new" technology.
I'm left wondering if what we're seeing in this marketing video is not what Nokia wants us to think about their new product, but how much of a dinosaur Nokia really is.
Come on, Steve Jobs spouts this kind of hyperbole at every single product launch.
The video cinematography was a bit too Apple-inspired for my taste, though, but at least it looked professional. Not used to seeing that, at least from competitors.
FaceTime would have been kind of like that if everybody had been making video phone calls every day since four years ago. Most people had never made a single video phone call, most people still haven't.
Using touch swipes on their phone though, everybody has, every day, for years. Outside of Nokia, that is.
Doesn't anyone remember this:
They ripped the style of the Apple product videos so perfectly (all the way down to an "every once in a while" opening) that it felt like a parody.
I was almost expecting a "One more thing..." in the end.
Seems there are at least 2 people who find pithy comments not worthy here so let me expand upon the point in a more verbose way to please them:
If you're Nokia you have zero chance at capturing imaginations with your products the way Apple does. There is no novel approach their corporate marketing team can come up with that will rival the winning formula Apple has produced. Apple's marketing today is probably better suited to the market than even the Think Different campaign in 1984.
Moreover, Apple has made their bones by contrasting themselves against beige corporate culture. Nokia is very beige.
Apple has framed the debate on their terms. So Nokia can choose to flail around in a mediocre attempt to find a different marketing strategy that works.... Or they can copy the unrivaled, unrelenting market leader. They are trying to produce a cool, trendy, powerful little smartphone. Why not embrace the Apple formula as best as you can. You're playing on their turf, so try to present yourself the way they do.
Or, in other words, when in Rome do as the Romans do.
I also think that if you can come up with a phone that adds 'significantly' more value than an existing phone, it will automatically capture attention. You dont need imitate the current players in the market.
There have been many examples in the past ( for eg: Google search Vs Yahoo search ).
But I do think that Nokia phone is really pretty, with pretty good UI features showcased. But I am not sure if it has the necessary qualities to make users switch from an existing iphone or android phone. I dont know if it adds "significantly" move value!
Of course switching between search engines is a lot easier than switching between phones, so that is also an important factor.
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.
Looks to be pretty incredible HW and UI paired with Linux goodness.
Better intro showing main features live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LffDQHp5E0
Adding both timelines into 1 view would make me miss a lot of "important" things
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/21/nokia-n9-first-hands-on/
The UI appears to be extremely smooth. There's also a demo of transitioning audio from phone to external speaker using NFC.
I've expanded http://www.gwern.net/Girl%20Scouts%20and%20good%20governance... to hopefully answer your wheat question.
As for your point about building character - I didn't see much of that in my sister when I was selling boxes with her or in her troop, I don't know how one would measure this one way or the other, and I don't think I actually criticized the cookie-selling practice at all, since the focus was on the price and whether money was being wasted by the organization. (Likewise, I don't follow your point about advertising. Walmart isn't exactly raking in all its profits and underselling Girl Scouts by auctioning off the advertising space on the sides of its cookie boxes.)
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.
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.
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
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...
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 love the design though - distinctive. Quite promising if they can make similarly bold designs for their phones running WP7.
I may even part with my faithful Nokia 6303 for one of these.
N9 - 12.1 mm [1]
iPhone4 - 9.3 mm [2]
[1] http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-n9/speci...
iP4: 9.3-9.3 mm
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. :)
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.