Looks like Nokia finally hired a designer with some taste

Look what Nokia went and did. With pretty much everybody writing the company off as already dead, the Finns have come up with the rather hot-looking N9 smartphone.

The specifications sound impressive. Powered by the MeeGo 1.2 operating system, the N9 has an 8MP camera (with Carl Zeiss glass lens), 1GB RAM and 16 GB or 64 GB of storage.

Interestingly the N9 is running the MeeGo operating system, which Nokia is laying to rest in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. So this might be the MeeGo’s last gasp before its head is plunged into the water trough one last time by Windows Phone 7, but it’s going out in style.

Joe Wilcox of BetaNews calls the N9 a “waste,” because MeeGo is basically dead once the first Windows Phone 7-powered Nokia phones ship in the next year or two. But to Gadget Lab, the N9 offers a glimpse into what Nokia and Microsoft have in store for us: cutting-edge hardware running a beautiful new operating system. Perhaps the Nokia-Microsoft partnership is indeed what both companies needed to survive and play catch up with Apple and Google in the platform wars.

With the N9, Nokia has “invented” a new gesture: the swipe. The phone has no home button (although you do get volume switches and the like on the side), so returning to the home screen is done by swiping in from any side of the screen. This could be annoying or awesome, depending on implementation.

The N9’s familiar icon-driven interface is divided into three sections. Events shows you the feeds from your friends’ social networks, along with notifications. A multitasking view shows an Exposé-style tiled view of all open apps, and the applications view shows all your apps as icons.

Impressive, but the outside is even better. Gone is the busy, miniature-computer styling of previous Nokia smartphones. This thing is a sleek marriage of a giant 3.9-inch 854 x 480 AMOLED Gorilla Glass screen curving gently out from a polycarbonate unibody body. It’s like a giant iPod Nano, in a very good way.

If Nokia can knock out phones this good with Microsoft’s lovely Windows Phone 7, then things might not be as bleak as they seemed. Available soon, price to be announced.

N9 product page [Nokia]

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