Nokia unveils N9

Finnish mobile maker Nokia has unveiled its N9 button-free smartphone, the company's first and only bet on the Linux-based MeeGo platform.

Nokia dumped plans to use MeeGo in its future smartphones when in February it picked Microsoft's Windows Phone as its future software choice, but it decided to unveil one of the models it was working on before closing the business line.

The N9 model, Nokia's first and last to use MeeGo, comes with a large touch screen and is available in black, cyan and magenta packing a 1GHz processor, backed up by 1GB of RAM. It's not going to give dual-core monsters like the Samsung Galaxy S 2 or HTC Sensation a run for their money, but it should make general tasks a speedy and pleasant affair.

As a Nokia device, the N9 will have access to Nokia's Ovi app store. But as apps will have to be built specially for MeeGo -- specially for this one phone, really -- we expect the shelves to be barer than a Soviet supermarket. That said, if you couldn't give a monkey's about apps and just want to surf the Web and take photos, this could well be right up your street.

There's an 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics stuck on the back, coming with decent low-light sensitivity and auto-focus, and is capable of recording in 720p HD at 30 frames per second.

Full Specifications