Nokia N9 - review of the disruptive device

Nokia N9 is very weird kind of beast. It is running MeeGo Harmattan OS and has been released after so-called elopocalypse when Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop has announced quite sudden and controversial turn towards Windows Phone platform, ditching both homegrown smartphone platforms - Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo - into gloom. Nonetheless, Nokia N9 has received positive reviews from mobile technology blogosphere around the world, which posed the question whether pivotal turn in Nokia's strategy was actually right move? As a former user and fan of Maemo-powered devices, including the latest N900, and also being quite sceptical about Microsoft partnership, I was particularly interested to see N9 myself. Once again, thanks to Nokia Connects I've had a chance to use N9 for past couple of weeks and see how it performs in real life.

Nokia's towel has been thrown - sad but true

So it happened. Mr Elop decided to make financial geeks happy (hmm, apparently not) and disappoint all devoted Nokia fans at the same time by announcing "strategic partnership" with Microsoft.

What struck me today in the morning, once such bold announcement has been made, is that no earlier than few months ago Mr Elop has been quite positive about future of Nokia in context of MeeGo in one of the interviews he gave. What had to happen in-between to suddenly make him claim Nokia as "burning platform" and need to "join an ecosystem" remains unclear. Yet I suspect his Microsoft roots had some influence here but we'll never know.

Nonetheless, this is it. We will now have MicroNokia (or better NoSoft) with Windows Phone OS rather than MeeGo.

Joining an ecosystem is like throwing a towel, really

There have been a lot of speculation and rumours since Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop has chipped in his famous line "[Nokia] must build, catalyse or join a competitive ecosystem". One of the latest and apparently "credible" rumour is that Nokia and Microsoft are going to join forces, leading Nokia to start offering Windows Phone 7 powered devices under their brand, possibly ditching their own platform(s) instead.

Let's say that is actually going to happen and Nokia will really "join a competitive ecosystem". Regardless if it will be WP7 or perhaps Android, it would definitely mean that Nokia will simply become a mainstream follower rather than loosing-but-striking-back innovator. This would be extremely disappointing and effectively would be understood as "sorry people, we surrender and adopt whatever is already on the market just to survive".

C'mon Nokia, you have far too much potential and power at hand to become yet another "MeToo" mass maker of WP7/Android devices just like HTC, Samsung, Huawei, ZTE and zillion others. You can do better than that. You have created a smartphone back a decade ago in the first place, for God's sake! Don't become the victim of own success but win that success back by brilliant and genuine smarthphones that would leave people breathless. That's surely nothing easy nowadays, yet everyone knows that you really are capable of doing that, Nokia.

As I'm not an industry expert, nor the financial analyst and that's all only my wishful thinking really, so I am not going to elaborate on that more than necessary, yet the closer we're getting to the magical date of 11th of February when all would suddenly become clear, the more worrying rumours appear all around the net and suggest the recent Nokia's promising push towards brand new mobile OS (MeeGo) and development (Qt) platforms is doomed anyway.

Let's hope all these crazy gossips are simply not true and Mr Elop would not disappoint his old and faithful Nokia fans.

Android makes me cry

I have been using Nokia N900 as a primary mobile phone for nearly a year now and I am quite happy with it. However, quite recently I've also bought the best value-for-money Android 2.1 device you can currenly get, which is Orange San Francisco aka ZTE Blade. I won't go in too much details about the phone itself, as anyone could easily look it up, but if you're after joining Android world cheaply, yet without much (any?) compromise in hardware area, then ZTE Blade is definitely way to go. Anyway, I have never intended new phone to replace my N900 because of lack of hardware qwerty keyboard which I'm very addicted to, nonetheless I gave it a shot and put my main SIM card into it for few days. That experience made me cry and I'm just about to tell you why...