Review by Amr Hijazi

The Nokia N9 is a solid, nice-looking phone. It’s simple. It’s slick. The hard corners are gorgeous. It dares you to try to throw it on the ground and then jump on it. It also has a decent weight and a fantastic grip.

In fact, there’s a lot to say about the Nokia N9.

A Button-free World
At first, it is hard to comprehend that there is no home screen button to press. Look, no buttons, ma! The whole experience is based on touch. Thankfully, it is a well-designed experience, and you soon get used to living without buttons.

In fact, it feels pleasantly strange not having buttons. It also feels weird having the light sensor at the bottom instead of at the top. You unlock the phone by double-tapping the screen, and then swiping in any direction. If you would rather not, you can still use the lock/unlock buttons on the side if you’d rather go the old-school route.

From the lock-screen view, you can access a shortcut menu by swiping up and holding your finger still. This menu contains shortcuts to what the developers obviously now assume are the main functions of a phone – the phone itself, messages, camera and browser.

Touchscreen Responsiveness
The most pleasant discovery about the N9 is that its smoothness and responsiveness is nothing like any previous Nokia touchscreen device. The touch capabilities are fantastic, although the iPhone is king of touchscreen slickness. It is also only responsive to the front tip of your finger; it is actually really frustrating to deal with if your fingers are dry, or if you accidentally swipe the phone with the sides or upper tip of your finger.

Software
The phone is unique in having only three view pages that contain everything you have on your phone; the applications page, opened applications page, and events page (containing the live feed of your Twitter account, Facebook account, mail application, and other notifications). It is quite annoying that you cannot really control the content of the event page to add anything else that you prefer. It’s the uncomfortable middle between Android’s complete openness and Apple’s complete control.

Hardware
It’s wonderful how well-designed the N9’s handset it. It’s strong, gorgeous, and different. The Clear Black AMOLED display is truly a sight to behold, with stunning viewing angles, and a curved Gorilla Glass front.
Yet, the N9 gets a really hot, slow and sticky when too many applications are active.

The energy conservation features of the screen are annoying. For example, the screen automatically switches off after a period of time, even if you’re playing a game that requires you to not touch the screen all the time.
For the charger, it is no surprise that N9 comes with one cable that can be used either to connect the phone to a computer via USB or to a power outlet via a power adapter. Since phone battery is essential, it would have been nicer if the phone also came with a dedicated power cable.

The Internet and the N9
If you are not connected to the Internet, the phone makes a point to annoy you to death by constantly prompting you to access a wi-fi connection (it’s like the N9 just won’t accept the decision that you do not wish to connect to the internet. It itches to connect.)

Browsing the internet on the N9 is easy and relatively fast considering it is only a phone. Zooming in and out of webpages and panning around the screen is really smooth, especially when compared to other Nokia devices. The phone’s native web browser is not the friendliest nor well-designed. For example, any new opened window that is opened for a new internet page is actually considered a separate application. This is extremely impractical since it means you have to do around 3 or 4 steps to switch between windows.

Camera
The 8MP camera is brilliant. Nokia have referred to it as the “fastest image-capturing phone”, and it’s hard not to agree.

All in all, the Nokia N9 is a good phone. However, the 500USD price range a bit too high. Furthermore, the N9 is said to be the last Nokia device to host the operating system MeeGo, and that makes it a phone with a limited future.