1 year of Nokia N9 and our 100th article

1 year ago on June 21, 2011 Nokia announced the Nokia N9 at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore. The official release was a couple months later on September 29, 2011. Introduced was a stunning looking device with a revolutionary user interface called Swipe. Except for the hardware specifications, the N9 was ahead of it's time in usability and features like NFC. But with the announcement of Nokia's strategy change and Microsoft's influence, difficult times came up for the N9.

Marko Ahtisaari at Nokia Connection 2011

1 year of Nokia N9

Since it's release Nokia N9 has enjoyed very positive reviews from all over the world by users and media - the Swipe interface and the good looking unibody design was very inspirational. But soon its future and reputation was put into question: Would the N9 survive Nokia's strategy change? 

Major difficulties have been:

1. Entering a highly competitive market

It's unbelievably difficult for a new phone with a complete new operation system to enter the highly competitive smartphone market. The brand-new MeeGo Harmattan wasn't initially mature enough to compete leading platforms like iOS (iPhone) or Android which have been on the market for a couple years. Furthermore a new platform misses one very important thing: Applications.

2. Missing applications

As one of the only smartphones on the market, Nokia N9 came with many apps out of the box where some of them are integrated into the system itself. Next to Facebook, Twitter, Skype and more, there were also some great games included like a version of the racing game Need For Speed. But disappointment was there, once you visited Nokia Store. Most famous applications like Viber and WhatsApp have been missing. Unfortunately we live in an "application-crazy" time, where many phone users feel they are dependent on certain applications. To bigger application developers the N9  hasn't been that attractive, since Nokia refused to sell the phone in bigger and important smartphone markets.

3. Not being distributed in major markets and bad marketing campaign

N9 unofficially sold in Germany

Major markets in Western Europe, Asia and the hole USA didn't officially receive the N9. Reasons could be that Nokia and Microsoft saw the N9 as a threat to the upcoming Lumia phones running Microsoft's Windows Phone software. Of course there was the possibility to import the phone from another country. But the typical phone user wants to profit from special offers by their carriers which are very common in a lot of countries. Furthermore the Nokia N9 marketing campaign was very unsatisfying and short. Most of the time it was left to the phone carriers itself to advertise the N9.

4. Lacking support and reduced development team

Support has been lacking in various ways: Barely any big development company was motivated by Nokia to port their applications to the N9 and only a few development devices were distributed. Another point was the confusion with Nokia Suite - many existing Nokia users were expecting to use this software with the N9. But instead they got NokiaLink which didn't satisfy many users and didn't even work properly in it's first version.

A big drawback was, when Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Symbian and MeeGo would be two platforms without future. The announcement was picked up by the media and the N9 therefore declared as "dead before its birth". The new strategy also affected the N9 developer team which got reduced drastically through layoffs and restructuring measures within the company.

Nokia N9 today

Nokia N9 is still there, still an amazing smartphone and in our opinion it's best days are still ahead of it. The application store grew and we got many impressive community applications like Wazapp. With PR1.1 and 1.2 N9 users got already two bigger updates and PR1.3 should arrive in the near future. There are even rumors about PR1.4 - but Nokia usually doesn't release any information about updates until the official announcement. We listened some great N9 projects or news of which we talked about on our website:

• Nokia Suite available for Nokia N9
• +400'000 Android application on Nokia N9
• Wazapp - a WhatsApp replacement
• NFC the future of payments
• FM Radio for Nokia N9
• Flashplayer available for Firefox
• Snowshoe, first Qt5 browser
• Nokia N9 runs Android ICS

100 articles on AllBoutN9.info

We are also happy to say that right now you are reading our 100th article. Even though our website recently was on a break for over 2 weeks, we had over 15'000 unique visitors and around 120'000 page views during the last month.

Furthermore it's great to see how active our readers are with leaving comments and starting discussions on AllBoutN9.info, Facebook or Twitter.

As we are supporting the N9, its users and developers, we would appreciate it a lot if you would support us. Despite having so many visitors we only got one single donation so far which is disappointing. Please help to keep this website active and a piece of the N9 community alive. Donations can be made through PayPal using various credit/debit cards. Please contact us if you prefer another payment method. Thank you very much!