At some point or another, most have us have owned a Nokia phone, and loved it. Those Finnish guys really know how to put together phones, but these days they are having a hard time because of poor software decisions. Their insistance to stick to Symbian all this time has been detrimental to the company’s sales and profits, especially at the high end of the market. But recently they let the world know that they will be adopting Windows Phone 7 as its flagship operating system going forward. Good on them.
But when Nokia announces a new handset, the world still sits up and takes notice. Yesterday Nokia showed off their new N9 handset, which is a stunning slab of hardware design. Perhaps more significant is the use of Meego, Nokia’s own smartphone OS which it has been very slow to roll out until now (a previous version called Maemo showed up in the horrible Nokia N900). At first glance the phone’s simple design is what grabs your attention. It is very simple, and the front of the device is dominated by the screen, with no hardware buttons. Its almost as if Nokia handed Dieter Rams an old iPod Nano and told him to use it as inspiration. It is one of those designs that looks like there is almost no design – just the most logical shape a smartphone can have. The glass on the screen is curved, and is also mended with the underlying (OLED) display like an iPhone 4, which gives the impression that the display is “painted on”. In typical Nokia N-series fashion – a high end Carl Zeiss lens equipped 8MP shooter is also found. Take a look at the official Nokia video for the N9:
Nokia is punting their “swipe” campaign to show off how the device works without buttons (except for volume and camera on the side). The user simply sweeps left and right to switch between the main screen (which shows calendar and social feeds and the like), app launcher and multitasking. (Sounds OK in practice – but how will this work with apps who want to use more complicated gestures?). My bigger issue is what exactly Nokia’s strategy is with Meego – it is currently a reasonably polished OS, but why would Nokia put all their design chops into a device that runs this almost once-off software? There are a few apps out for Meego yes, but its still a very poor catalogue. And these days it is all about the Apps. Nokia is punting its well known Qt platform to existing Nokia developers, but why would a developer focus its effort on Meego, when it is essentially only on one phone out there?
But Nokia is sneaky – go over to the quite impressive swipe.nokia.com homepage and start looking at all the pretty pictures of the phone, and also head over to the features and applications tabs. All very impressive looking. But then look around on the Nokia N9 pages – do you see one single mention of what OS the N9 is running? No. Sure, not every phone buyer is interested in what OS their phone is running, but I reckon its a pretty big component of buyer research these days. Part that bothers me is that users will look around these pages and think that the N9 is running Symbian, or even Android. Users will bargain on the fact that their will be apps available, and they will be in for a big surprise once they have this beautiful phone in their hand. Very sneaky.
All of this just smells of very 2008-like thinking from Nokia. You guys know that you are releasing the Windows Phone 7 devices soon, yet you still harper on about Meego. Did you have some executive that really wanted to see his pet project on the market? Here is my advice to Nokia – no one cares about Meego. Sure, it has some geek appeal, but smartphone buyers want apps on their phone – it is that simple. And there is very little reason for developers to bother with Meego right now. I can absolutely see this phone being a great flagship if Nokia indeed went ahead with Meego as its flagship OS, but we all know that did not happen. Meego is actually pretty cool looking, but its a dying platform. So this phone is all about the hardware design, which is a shame.
I will say the same as I did with Nokia E7 – let me know when this stunning hardware ships with Windows Phone 7.
