Who needs buttons when you can rely solely on touchscreen? Nokia (News 
- Alert) has scrapped the buttons with its latest phone, the N9, a phone that operates only with touches and swipes.
It's a stylized, minimalistic device with a unibody design and a 3.9-inch curved glass display. What has many perplexed, however, is that the N9 is running on the MeeGo platform, which Nokia is set to ditch. The N9 will be the first and last model that will use the MeeGo operating system. Some analysts doubt that it will take off, as the platform does not have a mature ecosystem of applications yet.
Rumors of the Nokia N9 first began to surface and spread around the Internet way back in the first half of last year.
What is true is that the Nokia N9 will indeed be the first handset to ship running the MeeGo operating system Aside from foregoing buttons, a quick double tap of the screen brings the N9 out of sleep mode, and swiping gestures allow you to move between the 3 home screens and the various applications and functions of the phone.
The 3.9” AMOLED touchscreen is “innovative laminated display technology” that makes applications look like they are “literally floating on top of the screen,” at least that is how Nokia describes it. The N9 will ship with two storage options – a 16GB model and a 64GB model – and it has a full gigabyte of RAM (News - Alert) and a 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU. It has a full range of connectivity features, including WCDMA, HSDPA and Bluetooth, and is future proofed with an NFC chip.
Aside from the N9, Nokia is due to launch other mobile phones relying on Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows operating system sometime this year.
“Our primary smartphone strategy is to focus on the Windows phone,” said CEO Stephen Elop in a speech at a technology trade show in Singapore. “I have increased confidence that we will launch our first device based on the Windows platform later this year and we will ship our product in volume in 2012.”
Nokia also plans to launch up to 10 new Symbian (News - Alert)-based smartphones over the next 12 months.
Elop said the N9 would go on sale later this year, but declined to specify the date or price.
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Michelle Amodio is a TMCnet contributor. She has helped promote companies and groups in all industries, from technology to banking to professional roller derby. She holds a bachelor's degree in Writing from Endicott College and currently works in marketing, journalism, and public relations as a freelancer.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
