Nokia N9

                              The Nokia N9 (codename 'Lankku', Finnish for "a flat plank of wood") is a smartphone made by Nokia based on the Linux MeeGo"Harmattan" mobile operating system, the first from Nokia on the MeeGo OS. It was released in three colors: black, cyan and magenta, after Nokia announced on Nokia World 2011 the white version of the phone it was available before the end of the 2011 year.

Histoy

The successor of Nokia N900, internally known as N9-00, was scheduled to be released in late 2010, approximately one year after N900 launched. Pictures of the prototype leaked in August 2010 showed an industrial design and a 4-row keyboard. A software engineer working for Nokia's device division cited the N9-00 (the product number) in the public bug tracker for Qt, an open source application development framework used in MeeGo. This design was dropped; then Nokia started working on the N9-01, codenamed Lankku, a new variant without a keyboard.

Nokia N9 was announced on June 21, 2011 at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore. At the time, the phone was presumed to become available to the public in September 2011.  Users can get notified via e-mail of the availability of N9 in their country at the webpage of the Nokia Online Store. Since Nokia closed its Nokia Online Shop in many countries, including France, Poland, Spain, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom and the USA on 30 June 2011 availability in those countries will be in the hands of retailers and operators.(...)

In August 2011 Nokia announced that Nokia N9 won't be available to the US.  Other reports tell that device won't be available on markets such as Japan, Canada and Germany.

Nokia posted on the official blog in the last week of September 2011 that the N9 is heading to stores. The initial retail price was announced to be around EUR 480 (16GB) and EUR 560 (64GB) before applicable taxes or subsidies.

In Germany, Devices imported from Switzerland are available online from Amazon and the German Cyberport GmbH. In January 2012, they were also made available in some major stores of the Saturn Media Markt chain.

In February 2012 Nokia N9 has appeared on Italian Nokia site, what is supposed to be a sign of N9 to be in official Nokia distibution on Italian market.

Prices in January 2012 were, depending on the size of the internal memory, between 500 € and 630€, being higher than the Windows Phone-based Nokia Lumia 800 and in the the same range as the Apple iPhone 4s.

System software

MeeGo

Strictly speaking, the Nokia N9 does not run MeeGo 1.2 as its operating system. It instead runs what Nokia refers to as a "MeeGo instance". During the development of Harmattan (previously marketed as Maemo 6), Nokia and Intel merged their open source projects into one new common project called MeeGo. Not to postpone the development schedule, Nokia decided to keep the "core" of Harmattan, such as middleware components (GStreamer) and packaging managers (the Harmattan system uses Debian packages instead of RPM packages). Nonetheless, Harmattan is designed to be fully API compatible with MeeGo 1.2 via Qt. As far as end users and application developers are concerned, the distinction between Harmattan and MeeGo 1.2 is minimal. Since all marketing effort would have been directed to "MeeGo", Nokia dropped the Maemo branding to adopt MeeGo as to not confuse customers.

The Nokia N9 user experience provides three panes, called Home, and a Lock Screen. Dragging or flicking horizontally navigates between the three panes of the home.  The Home consists of :

§  Events : It holds all the notification such as missed calls, upcoming meeting and unread messages/emails.

§  Applications : Menu with all the installed application shortcut. It displays 4 columns that can be scrolled up and down as needed by the number of application.

§  Open Applications : A task manager that can be viewed either as a 2 columns or 3 columns (a pinch gesture will switch between each mode). If more application are open that can be displayed on the screen, the user can scroll the open applications list up and down.

When in an application a swipe gesture from one edge of the screen to the other one will return the user to one of the three views of Home. This will not close the application, it will either be suspended or keep running in the background, depending on the application. To close an application, the user must press and hold until a red "X" appears on the upper left corner of the application thumbnail in the Open Application view, which will allow to close it. The user may also close apps by swiping from the top of the device and down while in the application, if enabled via settings. Clicking on the status bar on the top of the screen while using an application or on the Lock Screen, will display a menu allowing the user to adjust the volume, change the active profile (airplane mode, silent, etc...) and turn off the bluetooth, WiFI, 3G and 2G radio. The Lock Screen display the status bar, a clock and some notifications. This screen also holds music controls (introduced in PR 1.1) when the music player is active. It is customizable by the end user.

The phone can be unlocked by double clicking on the screen. Sliding the lock screen up reveals 4 shortcuts, called the Quick Launcher. The Quick Launcher can also be accessed while using an application.

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