Introduction

Nokia N9 was introduce to the world in June, 21st in Singapore to the world and has since gather a lot of interest from all over the world. It is the first Nokia phone loaded with Meego OS. 

User Interface and Swipe

Here is how the User Interface works. N9 starts off with 3 homescreens, one for Notifications and Social Network Feeds, one for whole list of application installed and the final but most interesting homescreen, the Liv e Multitasking homescreen.

Nokia wanted to change the way user interact with their phone, therefore removing all the physical hardware button from the front of the phone. All of the phones nowadays featured physical hardware button for some sort of user interaction including Nokia very own Symbian phones. This is going to change with N9 with the introduction of Swipe.

Swipe as the name suggest indicate a swiping motion, in this case, a swiping motion from one end to the opposite end. It works in all 4 directions, which is from top to bottom and vice versa as well as from left to right, and vice versa. Swipe act like a Home button, minimize application to the background and will be displayed amongst other minimized applications in Live Multitasking homescreen.

There is more though, while the active application is being subjected to the Swiping motion, it will remain active until the Swiping is completed. So if you are in the middle of your game session or watching video for example, the application and game will still be running until the swiping motion is completed. From my experience, it works very well and even has inertia attributes. For example, if you swipe across slowly, the app will minimize if you swipe past half of the screen but if you swipe less than half of it, it will remain the active app. If you are using the phone in landscape mode, you just have to swipe across fast to minimize the app without needing to swipe across half of the screen.

Contacts, Messaging, Email and Browser

Nokia has made it easy for user to transfer their contacts over from their previous phone. User can import their contacts from their iPhone, Android phone, or Nokia phone easily. They just need to pair both phone via the Bluetooth and then start the import sequence from Nokia N9 with some confirmation clicks on their previous phone. The phone book will show the list of your contacts with two initial letters for a better view, but there is no setting to adjust which letter to show. Apart from it, it also support kinetic scrolling as well as alphabetic scroll which is a must have nowadays. Dialpad also support smart dialing search for contact. Quick dial user like me will be disappointed to find out that there is no quick dial.

Messaging app has some nice touch up. First of all, you will be presented with a list of SMS sorted by date which will bring a conversation history between you and your recipient when clicked on. On top of that, there is a chat mode for you to chat with Facebook contact via the messaging app itself. A nice addition. Notification on SMS and chat will be shown in notification homescreen.

Email is also very user friendly. You can add as much emails as you like. I tried Gmail and Hotmail and both work out of box without additional setting for port etc. Emails are well separated by account and there is a search function to find the email using keywords. Further option to set periodic email check interval can be found under Accounts app in homescreen.

This is the app what matters most for most people, me included. The browser in N9 is default to desktop mode and there don't seem to be any setting to change it to mobile mode. It is fast, sleek and has a clean interface. However, as it is now, there will be no Flash Player 10/11 support as we speak. Then, there more getting used to for user. Unlike other platform which use Tab browsing, there is no Tab browsing for N9. Each window session of the browser appear as an app in live multitasking. So when you click to launch a link that is out of the domain which you are browsing, it will launch another window instead of a tab. To return to previous tab as we called it, you will need to close it and choose it from the live multitasking homescreen. I personally find this particularly annoying. I also hope that someday there will be option to launch a new window in background instead of making it active by default. There are also file extension limitation when you download files via the browser. One of the extension that I encounter this error happen to be RAR zip file extension. It would not allow me to download extension that it don't support.

Lock Screen, Screensaver, Calls

When N9 is idling, it will show the usual clock that we find on Symbian platform but with some nice addition. Instead of just a plain clock, there are symbols representing different types of notification you have receive. SMS is represented by the usual message icon, emails by the @ symbol and miss calls symbol as well. 

On to the lock screen, to wake the phone up from Screensaver, you will have to use the ON/OFF button or just simply double tap anywhere on the screen (This would require user to enable it in the DISPLAY settings). This will bring up the lock screen which will show some of the notification in detail instead of symbols shown in screensaver. I find it quite useful because I don't need to check if I'm just getting spam mail or SMS. 

I decided to include calls answering here because I find it so annoying for me. I seriously don't understand why do I have to slide to unlock the phone and being presented with another screen with buttons to receive or reject call or just silence it. This also prompt another question as to why there was no option to set the phone to silence by flipping it over. Even Symbian3 phones have this feature. Did the brilliant screen design with curvy exposed glass make it impossible to introduce this feature as it would subject the screen into contact with the surface you are flipping it on to, risking scratches on to the beautiful screen?

Camera, Video, Game

Let's move onto the camera now. There are plenty of settings to tinker with ranging from Scene, Flash, ISO, White Balance, Exposure, Image Quality, and geotag as well. But instead, I'm going to focus on Touch Focus instead. I have been longing for this feature on Nokia phone ever since I saw it on competing platform. It took them a while but here we are. The experience is somewhat different compared to what I'm used to. I was told that when the camera is in focus, the focus box will turn blue. But when I tried touch focus, it won't turn blue which tells me either it is not focusing like it should be or it's just a small bug that need to be address. Still, it's not a big upset, therefore for the time being, I will just touch to change the focus point, and use the shutter button to get a proper focus. By default, the outcome is slightly over exposed on most occasion but what I like about it is it's ability to capture sharp photo. Getting a sharp photo has been a frustration for me with the Nokia N8, therefore I'm preferring N9. There is HD video capture as well on the N9 but I will not get deep into it except that it has continuos auto focus for video mode.

Video playback seem to be another grey area for N9 due to its old hardware. The issue here is with the HD quality video playback. It seem like it was unable to playback HD content based on MP4 as well as H264. So I went Googling for answer. What surprise me is that while the one year old Nokia N8 actually supports the higher profile for both MP4 and H264, the N9 only support the lower end base profile. Someone who was using Nokia N900 (it was using the same gpu and therefore should have basically the same video acceleration processor) double confirmed with me that my findings are correct and there are limitation to what kind of HD content it was able to play. On the other hand, a fellow Ranger told me this could be fix with codec support ported over to the N9. I'm suspecting this could very well mean that this will have to rely on software processing to get over it but I do wonder if 1GHz CPU is capable of playing them smoothly. We will wait and see on that.

Gaming wise, there are no issues at all except for the limitation of games and apps currently available in OVI Store. There is one small problem though with NFC implementation for the games. While I truly saw NFC works with the N9 with another N9, but I couldn't get it working with my C7. NFC status bar is popping out in N9 but the extra stages in Angry Birds Magic did not unlock. I thought I was doing something wrong, therefore I went to try NFC for file sending and it worked flawlessly. I think this would eventually be solved by future firmware on both devices.

My opinion

I was disappointed with the choice of hardware only because of the problem I encountered with the HD Video Playback and from a price point of view. I could not find an answer as to how I should persuade someone to buy the N9 given that they could now buy a Samsung Galaxy SII for example for just RM100 more. On top of that, Android is a proven platform that has plenty of apps for offer and free as well, while the N9 is basically starting from scratch. To make the matter even worse, Nokia very won CEO said that it's being the burning platform and are going to make a big change over to WP7 with devices being introduced early next year. How much hope should end user place on Nokia that they will not abandon this platform is unknown.

Moving forward, the next topic I would like to discuss is Swipe. I can't say I'm totally not impressed because its really something new, easy to use, depending on your situation. However, when I was showing this to my friends, they were meh, this is it? Swipe to return to homescreen and the rest still based on clicks here and there. I went back and think again, truly what they have said is not totally out of it. Nokia want to introduce Swipe to change how we use the phone. Other than swiping to return to homescreen, there's basically nothing change in the way we used it. Even answering phone calls still using soft button. I can't help but wonder f Nokia could really improve on this and instead let user customize the swiping action for independent application for example switching between browser windows with horizontal swipe and return to homescreen with vertical swipe. There is a lot more possibility on swiping but as it is, it's not that special really. Moreover, the screen width for N9 make it really prone to accidental Swipe. While I think this could improve with prolong usage, I hope Nokia could certainly put more effort into making swipe more common in and around of the whole Meego-Harmattan OS rath than just focusing on the homescreen alone.