The Nokia N9 is the first and last phone the company plans to make running the MeeGo Linux operating system. That might be enough to convince you not to buy the phone, since any apps you purchase probably won’t be able to run on the next phone you buy in a few years. But it’s still nice to have a chocie, because the N9 looks like a pretty awesome phone.
Unfortunately if you’re in the US, the choice is pretty simple — because Engadget reports Nokia won’t be offering the N9 in the States. There’s also mounting evidence that the N9 won’t be available in the UK either.
The Nokia N9 has a 3.9 inch, 854 x 480 pixel curved AMOLED display and a 1 GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 processor. The phone’s camera has an 8MP sensor and a wide-angle 28mm lens.
The MeeGo operating system should look familiar to anyone that’s used iOS, Android, webOS, or other modern smartphone operating systems. But it’s miles ahead of Symbian in terms of the look, feel, and usability on touchscreen devices. Symbian is the smartphone OS Nokia has been offering for the past few years, although the company recently signed a deal with Microsoft to ship Windows Phone 7 on future smartphones.
At this point there are still far more smartphone apps designed to run on Symbian than MeeGo — and unless another phone maker picks up the torch and starts offering MeeGo devices, that’s likely to remain the case. But MeeGo is based on open source Linux software, which could make the N9 a hacker’s dream.