Nokia's N9 official: a luscious slab of MeeGo coming later this year ~ Mr. Informer

7:16 AM

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By Michael Gorman

Breaking News

Stephen Elop said that Nokia would unveil its first MeeGo device this year, and he just made good on his word with the N9 (also known as Lankku). Just as we spotted earlier, the N9 is a solid slab of 3.9-inch AMOLED screen (854 x 480) sans a keyboard or physical switches of any kind (well, aside from that oh-so-necessary volume rocker and camera button). The phone comes with 16GB or 64GB of onboard memory and 1GB of RAM wrapped in a polycarbonate shell that's colored all the way through, so dings and scratches won't show -- unless the wounds run deep, of course. An OMAP3630 1 Ghz processor does the computing while a PowerVR SGX530 GPU is around for graphical grunt work. Connectivity comes courtesy of quad-band GSM and penta-band WCDMA radios, plus Bluetooth 2.1, NFC, and GPS. There is also a dedicated camera button for the 8 megapixel wide-angle shooter, which is capable of aperture F2.2 for low light picture taking and true 16:9 720p video recording. Oh, and it's an AF shooter, not EDoF.

The entire thing measures 116.45- x 61.2- x 7.6-12.1mm and weighs 135 grams, with a battery capable of lasting up to 50 hours (music), 4.5 hours (720p video), or between seven and 11 hours (GSM yappin'). You'll also get gratis turn-by-turn drive and walk navigation with voice guidance in Maps, a dedicated Drive app, proximity sensor and a choice of hue: black, cyan, and magenta. Other hardware specs include 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, an ambient light sensor, compass, orientation sensor, a micro SIM slot, tethering support and a 3.5mm "AV connector." It'll be humming along on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, with apps being compliant with Qt 4.7 and HTML5 support bundled in.

As for software? Aside from Angry Birds Magic, Galaxy on Fire 2, Real Golf 2011 and OpenGL ES 2.0, those who take the plunge will be greeted with a Webkit2-based browser, pinch-to-zoom support, unified notifications for Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds in the Events view as well as social networking profiles and status updates merged into phone contacts. MeeGo touts a user interface simplified to three home views -- events, applications and open apps -- with a swipe gesture able to take you back to the home view. For those looking to expand upon what's loaded from the factory, Ovi Store access is included, but we've no idea what kind of pricing will be affixed. We'll be getting a fair bit of hands-on time with this guy in just a few hours, so keep it locked here for our first impressions!

Nokia's N9 official: a plastic slab of MeeGo coming later this year