Nokia’s N9 is a sexy device. The hardware design is sleek and dominated by a 3.9″ screen and its 8 megapixel camera (Carl Zeiss lens, of course) is sure to please. The rest of the N9’s specifications are pretty impressive (a 64GB internal storage option – Apple needs to get with it already) and I like that the N9 also includes NFC.
What I don’t really understand is why this device is running MeeGo which has become a sort of R&D project since Nokia took the decision to adopt Windows Phone 7. I understand that apps developed using Qt will run on this device as it will on other Nokia smartphones (right?) but this device should be running Windows Phone 7. It seems to be perfectly designed for that platform.
This reminds me of the N8 (not too long ago) which was the first device to run Symbian 3 (if I remember correctly), the next evolution of the Symbian platform. It was also the last device to run that OS which makes the move to Symbian 3 a little pointless. Rather hold off on the new devices until the Windows Phone 7 implementation is ready and roll those new devices out.
This OS fragmentation issue is becoming a little too common. RIM is or will have at least 3 versions of BlackBerry OS running on current devices (if you don’t count a planned shift to QNX). Android is struggling with fragmentation of its platform and we’ll probably only see consolidation with Ice-Cream Sandwich (which will apparently also unify phone and tablet platforms). Apple seems to be the only major player which is more careful with OS versions, which seems to make more sense to me and, I imagine, developers.
Update: Here is a great video with some design insights from Nokia’s designers:
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What do you think?