Nokia Announces The N9, A Gorgeous Phone That Shows Nokia Can Make Cool Stuff

Nokia just announced a brand new smartphone, the N9, at its Nokia Connection event in Singapore yesterday.

The N9 is a beautiful chunk of unibody plastic polycarbonate, coming in either black, cyan, or magenta.

Click here to check out some great pictures and videos of the N9 >

The whole package is 12.1 mm thin, and comes in 16 GB and 64 GB internal memory varieties. There are no buttons on the front of the device. It turns on via a double-tap of your finger.

Because there's no button of any kind on the front of the device, you use a new gesture to switch between screens. You swipe from any side of the screen all the way to the other side of the screen. It works vertically or horizontally. The gesture is unlike a flick, which doesn't need to traverse the entire screen.

The internals are pretty hot, too. The N9 has a 3.9-inch AMOLED screen, a 1 GHZ TI OMAP processor, 1 GB of RAM, and an 8MP wide-angle camera.

But all this style is basically being wasted. It's running on Nokia's Meego operating system, which the company is abandoning.

But Nokia promised a MeeGo device this year, and CEO Stephen Elop was determined to produce it. It's a "love letter to Nokia fans," and "nothing more than a collector's item," according to ReadWriteWeb.

This doesn't change the fact that the N9 looks great, and is a sign of inspiring hardware to come from Nokia going forward.

(via ReadWriteWeb, New York Times, Engadget)