If you’ve been following Nokia’s smartphone developments since 2010, then you might have heard of the long-rumored N9, a MeeGo-running device that’s been spotted rocking a touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. Well, the Nokia N9 is officially out now, but with a huge part seemingly absent. It still runs on MeeGo (making it the first ever smartphone to run on the OS), but they did away with the keyboard, along with every other button. The result? The N9 looks awesome, rocking a slim frame and a button-less front filled seemingly end-to-end with a 3.9-inch screen.
Acer unveiled another Iconia tablet at this year’s Computex that somehow doesn’t look any different from any other current 10-inch tablet, but it’s definitely set-up to be unique. Because unlike the current crop of 10-inchers that run on an Android OS and Tegra 2 chip, the Iconia Tab is powered by an Intel Atom processor and a MeeGo OS, making it the first tablet (the first by a major manufacturer, at least) to run on MeeGo.
The mysterious Nokia N9… news rumors of this phone have been on and off since last year, but we’ve yet to see any sign that it was actually going to be launched. Actually, the last time we heard of it was in a report that Nokia already axed the phone last February. That’s until it turned up again in a leaked teaser video [check it out after the break]. Besides the telling form factor that all but confirms that it’s indeed the Nokia N9 that we saw in previous leaks, the video didn’t give out specifics. We did manage to spot a few details though.
According to a Reuters report, Nokia has already dropped the N9 before it was even close to launch. Sad news if you’re a Nokia fan. Too bad because, judging entirely from past leaks, the N9 looked like a really interesting device. In case you never got a whiff of those older rumors, the N9 was slated to be the first smartphone to run on the new MeeGo operating system, packed a 1.2GHz Intel Atom processor under the hood, and featured the E7’s QWERTY keyboard-equipped slide-up form factor, the N8’s awesome 12-megapixel camera, and the MacBook Pro’s looks.
The MacBook-styled Nokia N9 will be the first mainstream smartphone to come packing Intel’s 1.2GHz Atom processor, if the report from Finnish tech mag Prossessori proves to be true. They didn’t mention how they knew (the report didn’t mention a source), but they also mentioned that the N9 will be the first phone to run on the MeeGo OS, which makes the N9 a big thing for Nokia’s smartphone plans to fight alongside Apple and the Android Army.
