So here we are ! The N9 and the N950 have finally been announced and they both look awesome (aspecially the N9 of course).
The N9 is the end user device, it's beautifull from the outside and from the inside (the software).
I won't go into the details of the hardware specs but it seems to be a great device (if you want to see a detailed review there's one here.
When even engadget says good things about a Nokia product it must be good :)
The N950 is pretty much the same device with a hardware keyboard and some other minor differences (the screen for instance). And it's aimed solely at developers (it won't be sold). But it runs the same software (Meego 1.2 Harmattan).
I just recently switched from my N900 to a brand new Motorola Atrix 4G and let me tell you why I already want to replace it with an N9 (or an N950) :
I'll start with what's the most important thing I want in a phone. I want to be able to do whatever I want with it.
My N900 is awesome for that : it can triple boot (Maemo, Meego and Nitdroid but I could also run other OSes on it), I can run my own custom kernels, fiddle with the system, etc. And I love that
On the other hand the Atrix is locked down. It comes with motoblur which is Motorola's customized Android. I wanted to put a vanilla android on it. Oh wait, no you can't : the bootloader is locked. So you can't change anything significant you're left with customizations or hacking the bootloader or something like that.
On most phones the camera sucks. I was expecting the same from my N900, well guess what it's the opposite : the camera is great : it takes very good pictures and very good videos. (Photo proof, Video proof)
Well when I got the Atrix I thought : "It's the same number of MegaPixels so it must probably be as good". Dead wrong.
The pictures I took with it suck and the videos are bad too (Video proof)
So yes Nokia knows how to make good cameras and I believe now that the "Carl Zeiss" label isn't just there to impress it is indeed a quality label.
And seeing this, this and this the N9 will be no different.
When you talk about Nokia phones the other thing that they're known for is the quality of the phone part.
Great reception, great sound quality, no antenna problems :)
After all they've been in this business for about 40 years so they know how to do it.
Last but not least Nokia has, in my point of view, the best mobile toolkit around : Qt/QML !
I've tried my hand at iPhone dev, Android dev and Maemo dev (using GTK and QT) and Qt/QML is by far the best experience I've had.
It's easy to learn, easy to do great things with and it has access to most of the Qt mobility framework allowing devs to take full advantage of things such as location services, web services, etc.
So yes I want to go back to a Nokia device.
Now on to the harder part....
Nokia has announced it's new strategy on November 11th as everybody knows. And this strategy is :
- Meego becomes a future disruption OS (whatever that means)
- WP7 will become the main OS at Nokia
- Symbian will be out in a few years
I remember being very frustrated at the time by Elop's decision to drop Meego and I thought to myself : "He must have seen some kind of unpolished version of meego and think : this sucks, we have to drop it"
I don't know what he had seen by then but if has seen a prototype of the N9 running a semwhat finished version of Harmattan, how could he drop that ??!!
So now on to the questions :
It's a legitimate question : I'm very happy that it's here but it doesn't make sense in Nokia's strategy : why would they unveil a device that's based on an OS in which they don't seem to have any more interrest ?
I thought I had found an answer to this question in this blog post.
What it says is that the devs had to battle management to get this thing out of the door so my answer was : "People at Nokia battled to get this thing out of the door and it's the first and last Meego device that Nokia will produce"
- But then why would Nokia invest so much in it ?
Nokia invested much money and effort to promote the N9 and the underlying QT framework :
- A new webiste
- A developer device the N950
- Updated QT SDK to include Harmattan
- So if it is going to be the last Meego device why bother ?
I don't really know and I think only maybe Stephen Elop (and other people at Nokia) knows. But in the end it's frustrating for everyone.
"Does Nokia have a clear strategy ?" is the question most developers and companies will ask. Why wouls you invest time and effort in a dead platform ?
I want to develop for Meego but if the platform is to disappear in a few years it's not good.
My thoughts at some point were : Nokia is going to keep Meego for the high end devices and replace Symbian on the low en dones with WP7 but I don't think WP7 can run on very limited hardware such as the one in those low end phones.
So did Elop jump off of an almost extinguished platform ? Does he have a plan in mind that will put all the pieces of this puzzle in place ? Is he payed by Microsoft to get Nokia to sink so they can buy it ?
In any case all this uncertainty doesn't help Nokia right now : the people that gravitate around this company want to know in what direction it's headed whether they jump ship or stay then is another question.