Nokia N9 [Review]

by Fahed Sabbagh on Apr 8, 2012 in Reviews | 1 comment

 

After the major partnership with Microsoft, Nokia’s future smart phones will all run Windows Mobile as you might have heard. The news might have been quite a shock to everyone in the mobile industry, as Nokia is already in enough trouble. Or is it?

We’re looking at Nokia’s last attempt at releasing a smart phone before adopting Windows; the Nokia N9. This might actually give us an idea about where the company’s heading over the next year.

Overview and Specifications

Now before we start the review, we need to say that the N9 is strikingly beautiful, possibly Nokia’s best looking phone to date. The body is made of a matt polycarbonate casing that comes in 4 different colours, jet black, rich saturated cyan or magenta, and glossy while. The polycarbonate body wasn’t just an aesthetic choice by Nokia; it also makes the N9 an incredibly sturdy scratch resistant phone.

On top, you’ll see a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, a small trap-door that reveals the Micro-USB data/charging plug, and gives way to open the Micro-SIM slot. With buttons on the right for volume and power control, and a single speaker at the bottom.

The 3.9 inch AMOLED touchscreen is protected by a layer of Gorilla Glass and covered with an Anti-glare polarizer so you won’t have to worry about light reflecting off your screen even in broad day light. The screen produces beautiful 480 x 854 pixel images and high contrast blacks, to the point where it’s almost impossible to tell where the screen ends and the body begins, if you were using the black version of the phone.

The N9 uses a 1 GHz Cortex processor with 1 GB of RAM, and comes with Nokia’s 8 MP Carl Zeiss Optics Camera, GPS, FM Radio, a built in – very loud – speaker, and NFC that you can actually start using immediately if you have some of Nokia’s accessories like the NFC enabled speakers, just tap the phone on them and start listening.

Software

As we mentioned, Nokia used MeeGo 1.2 as the operating system for this phone, a Unix-based light-weight OS that does the job perfectly, it might have actually had a chance to compete with the big boys, Android and iOS, if Nokia didn’t kill the project and move to Windows Mobile.

The interface is very similar to that of iOS; it uses many of the same operational features since the phone doesn’t have any navigation buttons on it. However, it features easy to use, smooth swipe actions to switch between or close applications.

With MeeGo as the OS, the phone won’t support standard apps in the EVO market. Instead, it has its own version of the market, and already comes with most of the apps you’ll need from an everyday phone.

The N9 is one of the easiest phones to use on the market, very smooth, possibly one of the best multi-tasking features, and really impressive 2D and 3D graphics performance.