Nokia Unveils the N9: the First and Last MeeGo Smartphone

With a glorious fanfare of the sad trombone, Nokia has finally unveiled its first and last MeeGo smartphone: the N9. MeeGo, a Linux operating system based on Maemo and Moblin, was originally meant to be Nokia's next-generation smartphone and tablet OS -- but then Nokia decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater and jump into bed with Microsoft and Windows Phone 7. The N9, as far as we know, will be the single fruit of the MeeGo team's efforts -- though, as it's an open source operating system, it could turn up on another smartphones in the future.

As you can see, the N9's other defining feature is the complete lack of physical buttons on the front of the phone. Nokia claims this is a world first, but leaves it as an exercise to the reader to work out whether this is a good thing or not. There are still hardware buttons for volume control and the camera, but they're tactfully tucked away on the right side, embedded into the beautiful unibody polycarbonate shell. Color-wise, you can choose from black, blue (cyan), and pink (magenta).

Hardware-wise, this is Nokia's most powerful phone to date. The screen is a beautiful, curved-glass 3.9" 854 x 480 AMOLED affair. There's quad-band GSM and penta-band WCDMA radios under the hood, and NFC, Bluetooth, and GPS support. There's an 8-megapixel camera on the back with a dual-LED flash -- and of course it's capable of shooting 720p video. With Dolby Headphone and Dolby Digital Plus support on the 3.5mm audio jack, Nokia is also claiming that the N9 is the first smartphone to support virtual surround sound on any headphones. The CPU is actually a bit lackluster -- an old 1GHz OMAP3630 -- and the PowerVR SGX530 GPU is a bit geriatric, too.

Finally, the N9 will come with a fairly impressive selection of built-in tools and apps! The smartphone will ship with an NFC-enabled version of Angry Birds, free turn-by-turn navigation from Nokia Maps and Drive, and baked-in support for Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds. In theory, Nokia's Ovi Store will be updated with MeeGo-compatible apps -- but there's no word on how many apps will be available at release, or how they will be priced.