When Nokia N9 was launched it blew everyone's mind and made one say 'wow what a phone', an easy to use Harmattan UI on top of MeeGo OS married to a stunning, beautifully crafted, uni-body polycarbonate shell, N9 is a man-made marvel of a mobile phone. What you basically do is swipe left, right, top, bottom from the edge of the phone's screen to navigate to different screens such as Menu, app-switching/Multi-tasking, Notifications. It is revolutionary, unique and well thought out Menu system I've ever used, UI grows on you well and I bet one will accidentally swipe any other phone atleast once after using N9. In this post I share my thoughts about N9.
Swipe..swipe...swipe all over.
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| Menu screen. |
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| Notifications screen. |
One of the cool features on N9 is swipe, there is also Swype(text input) but
we'll come to that later. Swipe actions across the screen is all you do
to switch between Menu, Open applications and Notifications screens.
N9 has flat menu structure, all applications you download is on the menu
screen, there is no support for folders within Menu(Update: with PR1.2 you can create folders), you may have a
very long menu screen when you stuff it up with applications. You
can re-arrange applications by tapping and holding a particular icon and drag
it anywhere in the Menu screen. Notifications screen does what it says by showing Missed calls, e-mails, messages etc. It doesn't notify you for unread tweets, replies, Facebook messages/ unread comments instead it shows your entire Twitter timeline and Facebook news feed. Status bar, on top, is visible all time showing battery status, Operator name and signal, date and also it shows your Gtalk, Facebook and Skype online status with a green icon notification. Phone wouldn't connect me with Gtalk saying 'incorrect password', this seems to be a common problem with N9, work-around is to go 'all offline' and then go 'all online' which works for me.
There is, what I call, a drop down utility which pops down when you hit status bar portion, containing Profile switcher, Volume control, shortcut to Bluetooth, Data connection and Transfer(photo upload/download).
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| Status bar showing online status |
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| Drop down menu with controls |
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| Multi-tasking/open apps screen |
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| Twitter timeline in Notifications screen |
Social networking, online services and wi-fi hotspot out of the box:
Coming from Symbian devices I was very much happy to see N9 has built-in, decent, social networking support. Phone comes with Accounts application where you can set N9 to talk with Google, Twitter, Facebook and other online services. Native twitter app has pretty much all features one expect on a twitter client, picture upload support was added to it with PR1.1 update, it uses Twitter's own picture upload service. Adding few more features like sound notification, setting to change refresh intervals, integration with Gallery application would make it near perfect. For some reason app won't tag my location to tweets. Twitter application on N9 does the job very well and it is light years better than pathetic Nokia Social in Symbian devices. Hope Nokia adds few more features to it.
Facebook client, with Facebook chat, is basic but it is nicely integrated with the OS, photos from Gallery can be uploaded directly to Facebook albums. There is no Check-in support but again it does the job well for a normal Facebook user(like me). As an alternative you can download Fmobi from Nokia store, which is a full-fledged Facebook client, it is available as 7 days trial after which you have to purchase the application. For hardcore Facebook users Fmobi ticks all the boxes. Not to be forgotten, with excellent html5 support in the web browser http://touch.facebook.com works beautifully, without any hiccups and slow-downs. There seems to be a bug in N9's web browser with Facebook's touch site, which I came across recently, adding new comments to posts won't work, comments won't appear when posted. This problem seems to be only in N9's browser, I tested same on Nokia 5800's web browser and on Sony Ericsson Xperia mini running Gingerbread there was no such problems with both the phones.
N9 comes with Wi-fi hotspot feature as well, with WEP encryption.
Photos from Gallery can be posted directly to Flickr and Picasa albums. Other options in Gallery includes favorites, tags and Edit. Recently, Nokia beta labs came up with a plugin called "Photo map plugin' for N9. Once selected photo map plugin shows the location tagged to that photo on Nokia maps on the phone, photos must be Geo-tagged for this('Use GPS' and 'Use geotags' option must be enabled under camera settings), nothing earth-shattering but a nice little feature to show-off to your friends.
Web browser:
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| N9 |
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| Xperia mini. |
Web browser on N9 shines in rendering web pages. I ran html5 test and Acid3 test on web browser on N9 and compared it with my SE Xperia mini running Android 2.3.4, N9's web browser scored more in both the tests, results clearly shows what it is capable of. Coming the real world performance, browsing web on N9 is an enjoyable experience, not even once browser crashed or slowed down when opening websites, you can share web links to Twitter from web browser. One thing I was highly impressed with the browser is it displays websites in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam(BTW they are South-Indian languages, excluding Hindi) content well, when I say well it is on par with how it gets rendered on a Desktop browser, flawless it is. I no need to open my laptop for reading Tamizh news websites(which is my mother tongue language) hereafter, N9 does it well. Playing YouTube videos via http://YouTube.com/html5 works well too. With future of web content being html5(here's hoping) I see N9 is all equipped to excel in any operation in regards to web browsing.
On the other hand web browser on N9 is one of the less featured ones around, no bookmarks support, no automatic text re-flow, no copy & paste, inability to store passwords, no flash support(well is that a drawback hereafter?) to name a few. Overall Web browser seems like a unfinished application on N9, lacking basic features.
Text input:
Any touchscreen phone should have a good on-screen keypad to give a better typing experience compared to phones having physical keypad. N9's on-screen keypad is excellent, I always feel I can type faster on this keypad both in portrait and landscape, not with great accuracy though. Word prediction is there but I didn't find it of much use to me. With PR1.1, Nokia added Swype text input for N9. Text prediction and auto-correction works excellently here. Swipe across to get swype keyboard implementation is a clear stroke of a genius, it is one the coolest way to toggle text inputs I've seen on ANY phone, N9 users will agree with me here, enough said.
NFC, only for content sharing.
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| Swipe to get Swype |
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| Swype in action. |
Nokia is talking big about NFC(Near field communications), their newer Symbian devices(err.. in what name should I call them now?) have built-in NFC. N9 is the only MeeGo device with NFC. Photos, videos, music files, documents, contacts etc. can be shared to another Nokia device with NFC, Nokia call it as tap to share. I couldn't test tap to share as I don't have a Symbian device with NFC support. Nokia also have good range of NFC audio accessories like Nokia play 360 speakers, MD310 music receiver etc. NFC is one technology which could take-off in 2012, at present there is nothing much can be done with it than content sharing.
Games:
N9 comes pre-loaded with Angry birds magic(levels need to be unlocked using NFC), Real Golf HD, NFS Shift and Galaxy on fire. I'm not a mobile gamer so couldn't give a pro comment on frame rates, gameplay etc., but I can say all games played buttery smooth with no noticeable lags. There are no big games titles nor you can expect it to come, whatever you see on Nokia store is a bonus. I got addicted this game called 'Incredible Circus', liked the gameplay and levels get interesting and tougher when you advance. Worth giving a try, atleast you won't get bored in a train or bus journey.
Music, Video player and Camera.
Music player has a nice look and feel to it, recently added albums art are displayed on top, music files are sorted automatically in artists and albums. Music player in another application with minimalistic features, you can't create a new playlist but can add songs as favorites. With no equalizer support you have to hear how the device plays it. Ovi music(Music on Ovi) is integrated with Music player, only service under the name Ovi you can see on the phone. Recommended albums are displayed within the player using this service. I don't see the point in Ovi music as a service now, you can't purchase music, there are no 'comes with music' phones by Nokia, I don't know one they launched recently. It works for those people with existing subscription which I believe won't work for longer time from now.
Games:
N9 comes pre-loaded with Angry birds magic(levels need to be unlocked using NFC), Real Golf HD, NFS Shift and Galaxy on fire. I'm not a mobile gamer so couldn't give a pro comment on frame rates, gameplay etc., but I can say all games played buttery smooth with no noticeable lags. There are no big games titles nor you can expect it to come, whatever you see on Nokia store is a bonus. I got addicted this game called 'Incredible Circus', liked the gameplay and levels get interesting and tougher when you advance. Worth giving a try, atleast you won't get bored in a train or bus journey.
Music, Video player and Camera.
Music player has a nice look and feel to it, recently added albums art are displayed on top, music files are sorted automatically in artists and albums. Music player in another application with minimalistic features, you can't create a new playlist but can add songs as favorites. With no equalizer support you have to hear how the device plays it. Ovi music(Music on Ovi) is integrated with Music player, only service under the name Ovi you can see on the phone. Recommended albums are displayed within the player using this service. I don't see the point in Ovi music as a service now, you can't purchase music, there are no 'comes with music' phones by Nokia, I don't know one they launched recently. It works for those people with existing subscription which I believe won't work for longer time from now.
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| Music player screen |
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| Ovi music |
I am not much impressed with video playback, videos played laggy (DVD quality movies which my E7 played well) and at times audio not synchronized properly. Phone didn't play any 720p HD video well, worst case it won't even open it. XVID encoded .avi format videos played well though. More codecs support needed, maybe with an update or two.
I don't know what to talk about the camera, mobile photography is one thing which Nokia is good at. A person as inept as me in photography all I can say phone takes pictures very fast and camera UI is good. Though, results are not what I expected from a 8 Megapixel camera phone from Nokia.
Before I decide to conclude my thoughts, Push notifications in N9 don't work with any application on the phone. There is an option to enable to Push notification under settings > Notifications, only Nokia pulse application, which was released for N9 recently, makes use of it. Nokia should seriously consider enabling push notification for Twitter, Facebook with next update, if at all they've planned to do so.
I don't know what to talk about the camera, mobile photography is one thing which Nokia is good at. A person as inept as me in photography all I can say phone takes pictures very fast and camera UI is good. Though, results are not what I expected from a 8 Megapixel camera phone from Nokia.
Before I decide to conclude my thoughts, Push notifications in N9 don't work with any application on the phone. There is an option to enable to Push notification under settings > Notifications, only Nokia pulse application, which was released for N9 recently, makes use of it. Nokia should seriously consider enabling push notification for Twitter, Facebook with next update, if at all they've planned to do so.
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| Nokia pulse notification on Lock screen |
Nokia is committed to WindowsPhone7 for all right reasons and one can see why a Lumia800 is much talked about and not the N9. It is all about support, good applications, developers attention and nifty marketing which N9 hasn't received to a great extent. That doesn't imply it is all over or did Nokia say they are going to wash their hands off. There are some really good utilities available in Nokia store and I find new apps every time I open the store. I'm very lucky to have got a N9 and I enjoy using it everyday with no regrets. With all good hope, let the year 2012 bring new improvements and features to this beauty.
On that note I wish a very happy and gadget filled new year 2012. Hope this year bring more new toys to you.
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| Scribbled using 'Bord' application for N9. |
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