Looks like Nokia finally hired a designer with some taste. Photo courtesy of Nokia
By Ryan Paul, Ars Technica
Nokia has finally announced the long-anticipated N9 handset, the culmination of Nokia’s five-step plan to deliver a mainstream Linux-based smartphone. The N9 is an impressively engineered device that is matched with a sophisticated touch-oriented interface and a powerful software stack with open source underpinnings. It’s a worthy successor of the developer-centric N900, but it provides a user experience that is tailored for a mainstream audience.
The N9 is the first truly modern smartphone that Nokia has unveiled since the start of finger-friendly interface revolution. Although it’s a significant technical achievement, it’s sadly a pyrrhic victory for Nokia—the device has arrived a year too late. The Finnish phone giant has already abandoned its Linux platform in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system.
The N9 has a 1GHz TI OMAP Cortex A8 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 3.9-inch AMOLED capacitive display, and an 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics. The hardware specifications aren’t industry-leading, but are still respectable—especially when you consider the fact that much of the software is native code, not hampered by the resource overhead of a managed code runtime. The industrial engineering is outstanding, featuring a curved glass screen and slender polycarbonate body.
The front of the N9 has no buttons, a design decision that was made possible by the software’s gesture-based interaction model. The N9 user interface, which is largely built with the open source Qt development toolkit, has a completely new look and feel. Aside from the rounded icons, it looks very different from Symbian and the Maemo interface of the N900. Nokia is calling the new user experience layer “Swipe” in reference to its emphasis on the swiping gesture. It has a very fresh and distinctive style.
There is some confusion about the exact configuration of the N9 software stack. Nokia’s official marketing and PR material cite MeeGo 1.2 as the software platform, but it’s actually a hybrid that is largely built on Harmattan, the legacy Maemo 6 code base that Nokia shuttered when it committed to MeeGo.
It seems sort of dubious on the surface to call the software MeeGo when it’s really still Maemo, but the hybrid is apparently designed in such a way that it has full API compatibility with MeeGo 1.2. What this means is that the distinction will be little more than an implementation detail as far as users and application developers are concerned.
A closer inspection of Nokia’s MeeGo strategy shows that this hybrid approach is entirely consistent with the roadmap that Espoo was espousing earlier this year.
Another major point of confusion is the relationship between the new N9 and a leaked prototype with the same name that showed up on the radar last year. The original MeeGo-based N9 prototype had a slide-out physical keyboard and was thought to be scheduled for a Q1 2011 launch. That design, which was known internally as N9-00, was dropped. The release date got pushed back as Nokia started a new keyboardless design called the N9-01, codenamed Lankku, which was likely the basis for the N9 that Nokia unveiled this week. Based on some odd images that Engadget spotted, it looks like N950—a special developer variant of the N9 that will only be available to select third-party developers—might be based on the original slide-out keyboard design.
Will it blend?
Although it appears to have a lot to offer, the N9 unfortunately won’t get an opportunity to shine. Nokia’s schizophrenic platform strategy and lack of long-term commitment make the device a non-starter. The new phone is a bit like the Titanic: a masterpiece of quality engineering and luxury craftsmanship that is doomed to sink on its maiden voyage. The ambiguity of MeeGo’s role in Nokia’s future product lineup and the company’s frustrating mixed messages to third-party software developers have already set up the N9 for failure.
When the rumors first started to emerge about the possibility of Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7, I was highly skeptical. As I pointed out at the time, Nokia’s MeeGo efforts were very close to producing the kind of platform that Nokia needs to be competitive. The company had effectively bet its future on MeeGo—meaning that any change at such a late stage would be borderline suicidal.
When new CEO Stephen Elop issued his now-infamous “burning platform” memo, my advice to the company was to go all-in on MeeGo and avoid the distraction of a transition to another operating system. Elop, however, had other ideas. His opinion was that MeeGo would simply take too long to deliver, whereas adopting WP7 would allow them to get a product to market with a modern operating system right away.
The fact that a compelling MeeGo device will likely launch first raises the question of whether Elop misjudged the Linux-based platform and its suitability for consumers. It’s worth noting, however, that Nokia is also on track to launch its first WP7 device this year. Elop was not wrong in his contention that Microsoft’s platform offered Nokia a quicker path to the market.
It’s likely that Elop viewed the long-term challenges of doing proper MeeGo maintenance and integration (vs. the quick-and-dirty hybrid model of the N9) as an untenable challenge for a company in Nokia’s position. The decision to adopt WP7 was an exit that allowed Nokia to avoid the difficulty of advancing its own platform. The downside is that dependence on WP7 will relegate Nokia to the role of a mere hardware manufacturer. In choosing WP7, Nokia is sacrificing the kind of platform autonomy and opportunity to control its own ecosystem that it would have had with MeeGo.
Elop has said on several occasions in the past that MeeGo will remain in the background at Nokia as a research platform for future innovation, albeit with significantly reduced investment. It’s not really clear what this means, but it seems fairly obvious that MeeGo doesn’t have a strong strategic relevance at Nokia anymore due to the switch to Windows Phone 7. Without more clarity about the extent to which Nokia will support the platform and consumers who buy the N9, it’s hard to imagine it attracting a serious mainstream audience. If Nokia doesn’t treat MeeGo as a serious platform, then the N9 is simply not going to get enough traction to make it viable, especially when it comes to third-party software.
The sad part is that Nokia once had a large audience of third-party developers who were eager to support a MeeGo device. Companies like Rovio and Qik already had Qt-based ports of their applications under development specifically for Nokia’s MeeGo devices. The new platform strategy has thrown the company’s existing third-party developer community under a bus and has made it impractical for them to continue supporting the company’s products.
If Nokia ported its open source Qt toolkit—which is supported today on MeeGo and Symbian—to WP7, it would open the door for building applications that target all three of the company’s major operating systems. Unfortunately, that’s just not going to happen. Elop himself rejected the possibility of Qt on WP7.
Nokia’s attitude about Qt through this platform transition has been agonizingly inconsistent. During the presentation at which the N9 was unveiled, Qt was repeatedly highlighted as a critical part of Nokia’s vision for mobile development. From where I’m standing, it’s not at all clear how Qt can continue to be defining part of Nokia’s mobile strategy when it’s not even going to be supported on the company’s flagship WP7 devices.
Nokia can tout the large Symbian install base as a target that makes Qt relevant in the mobile space, but that’s a dead end—Sybmian will be phased out in 2014. It’s not even clear now if Qt 5, scheduled for release in 2012, will even officially support Symbian. Qt is still one of the best tools available for cross-platform desktop development (and thanks to a permissive license and diverse community, the toolkit’s survival is ensured in the long run irrespective of what Nokia does), but it’s not officially supported today on any mainstream mobile operating system.
When I think of Nokia and its place in the market today, I’m reminded of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Janus is often depicted as a being with two faces pointed in opposite directions. At times, it seems like Nokia is still looking back at MeeGo as if it lies ahead and at other times the company is seemingly aimed at an unwavering path towards WP7.
The mixed messages and inconsistencies in the platform strategy are not helpful. By creating confusion about what development tools and platforms Nokia is really going to stand behind in the long-term, the company is making it impossible to have any confidence in its future plans. This is especially problematic for its first—and possibly only—MeeGo device, a compelling product with little future ahead of it.
Titanic slide image by Flickr user Lorraine W
