Nokia N9 news
The Nokia N9 has one of the most striking and gorgeous hardware designs of any smartphone on the market. Composed of a single piece of polycarbonate, the N9 lacks any seams or breaks, offering a continuous, uninterrupted flow from the front to the back of the phone. Nokia machines the body of the N9 from a block of polycarbonate, which the electronics are then inserted into. Since the color of the phone - black, cyan, magenta, or now glossy white - is the actual color of the material that the body of the phone is composed of, it is impossible for it to wear or scratch off. The black, cyan, and magenta models have a matte finish, which lends a bit of grip to the phone when held in your hand, while the white model's glossy finish attracts a fair amount of fingerprints and grease.
Inlaid into the front of the phone is a curved ClearBlack AMOLED display. Measuring 3.9 inches diagonally, the screen offers WVGA (480 x 854 pixel) resolution, Gorilla Glass for durability, no air gap, and an anti-glare polarizer. Nokia has managed to make the images on the screen appear as if they are floating in mid-air. The ClearBlack display lives up to its name, as blacks are so inky deep that it is frequently hard to distinguish between the display and the jet-black bezel that surrounds it. Colors are bright and punchy, and are more reminiscent of the super-saturated colors found on Samsung phones than the more natural tones seen on the iPhone. The curvature of the display makes it effortlessly blend right into the body of the phone, giving the N9 a feeling of one continuous block of material. The anti-glare polarizer does an excellent job of making the N9 visible in direct sunlight, something that is usually a weak point of AMOLED screens.
The front of the N9 does not have any buttons. In fact, there are only three buttons on the whole phone, thanks to its unique software interface. Located in the bottom right corner, below the display, is a front-facing camera for video calling, while a charging indicator light is found directly across from there. Above the screen are an ambient light sensor, earpiece, and silk-screened Nokia logo.
The sides of the N9 go from 7.6mm thick at the ends to 12.1mm in the middle of the phone, but thanks to the curved design, it feels much thinner in the hand than its measurements might lead one to believe. The left side is devoid of any buttons or controls, while the right side is home to a volume rocker and power/sleep/unlock key. The buttons seem to be the only weak point in the N9's hardware, as they do not have great travel or feedback. They are machined out of metal and polished to a glossy shine, however.
On the bottom of the N9 is an external speaker that manages to prevent any muffling due to a misplaced finger, while the 3.5mm headphone jack, micro-USB charging and syncing port, and micro-SIM card tray are located in the top of the phone. The micro-USB port can be accessed by depressing a little plastic door that flips to reveal the port. I am not usually a fan of covers over micro-USB ports, as the tend to impede convenience when charging or syncing the phone, but when they are this well designed, I can make an exception.
Flip over the N9 on its face and you will be greeted with a pretty stark back, broken up by a shiny metal plate that brings attention to the 8 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss lens. While the rest of the N9 does a remarkable job at resisting scratches and blemishes, the metal surround for the camera gets scratched and scuffed quite easily. Above the camera lens is a dual-LED flash.
The N9 is not a featherweight, tipping the scales at 135g (4.76oz). Nevertheless, it feels solid in your hand, and the curved design once again helps to mask its girth. The N9 measures 116.45mm long and 61.2mm wide, just a hair larger than an iPhone 4.
Usability
The Nokia N9 runs Nokia's MeeGo operating system ? version 1.2 Harmattan, to be specific. It is the only phone on the market to run this particular OS, and it seems like that will always be the case, since Nokia has transitioned its smartphone division over to Windows Phone. Eschewing any physical buttons on the front of the N9, MeeGo relies on gestures and swipes to navigate the OS and control applications. There are a number of unique ways that gestures are incorporated into MeeGo, and the hardware of the N9, with its curved display, really lends itself to their use.
You can unlock the phone using one of two methods: using the button on the side of the phone to wake up the display, or by double-tapping the display, which is my preferred method. Once the display is woken up, you can swipe across the screen from any direction to unlock it, or swipe up part way and hold to reveal quick launch keys for phone, messaging, camera, and the browser.
The main interface of the N9 is split into three panels with a traditional grid of app icons in the middle, multitasking menu to the right, and notifications and social media streams on the left. You can cycle through the screens by swiping left or right until you land on the one that you want. Gestures also come into play once you open an app. Swiping in from the left or right side of the screen will bring you back to whatever homescreen you were last on, while swiping down from the top will close the app and swiping up from the bottom will minimize to the multitasking menu. You can also access the quick launch shortcuts from any app by swiping up part-way and pausing for a moment. The whole system of gestures is very fast and fluid, and quite intuitive once you know what each gesture accomplishes.
As mentioned, the multitasking system on the N9 gets its own dedicated pane on the homescreen. Swiping over to the multitasking panel, you are greeted with a grid of screenshots of your running apps. Pinching in or out on the grid changes it from two across to three across, and you can scroll up and down to access apps that you want to use. You can press and hold on the screen to bring up red X's in the corners of each app to kill them individually, or you can choose to close all of them with a button that appears at the bottom. The multitasking system is fast and easy to use, and since it is so accessible, it makes juggling tasks simple.
The N9 is powered by a single-core, 1GHz processor and is equipped with 1GB of RAM. This combination produces better performance than one might expect, as the phone is fast and responsive - most of the time. When I first received the N9 review unit, performance was inconsistent as there are points where the system seemed to get overwhelmed, and actions became very choppy and laggy. Heading over to the multitasking screen and killing a few active apps tended to help the situation, but it was quite frustrating when a single background task brought the system to a crawl. Thankfully, during my review period, Nokia pushed a software update to the N9 that addressed a number of the performance issues I had and now the N9 multitasks much more smoothly.
Nokia has installed one of the best software keyboards I have ever used on the N9. It is fast and responsive, and it has the perfect amount of audible clicks and haptic feedback. The haptics are so good that I actually left them on, and haptics are usually the first thing I disable on a software keyboard. Nokia's auto-correct system is less impressive than the keyboard itself, as I found it wasn't aggressive enough in correcting my mistakes. Instead of overwriting an error with a correction, the auto-correct system has the ability to show what the correct word should be, but it would not replace the word with the correction. The same thing happens for contractions, which slows down your typing when you are moving at a fast clip. The recent software update brought the Swype keyboard to the N9, which works as expected, if you prefer tracing your words instead of tapping them out.
Overall, the N9's user interface is very attractive and enjoyable to use. The squarish circles that each app icon are composed of are seen throughout the OS, and there are many fancy and attractive animations that make it more fun to use the phone. Nokia developed a font specifically for the N9 called Pure, and it is very clean and legible, and very similar to the font used in the Metro UI in Windows Phone. Little things, such as using concentric circles to set an alarm's time in the clock app, really showcase the attention to detail that Nokia's engineers gave the MeeGo interface. Nokia also takes advantage of AMOLED's power-sipping features with an always-on clock and notification panel that moves around the screen when the phone is idle. Since AMOLED displays use minimal power to display black, the pixels that show the time and the notifications are the only things using power, and they use very little at that. It would be great if Nokia could apply some of the user interface tweaks, such as the double-tap to wake up the display or even the on-screen keyboard, to its Windows Phone devices, but it is not clear if that will happen or not.
reference @mobileburn
