Riccardo Mori

Introduction

I was interested in acquiring this smartphone because I wanted to understand what was so special about it; why it had reached a ‘cult’ status; why it’s so much sought after. I had been seeing eBay listings with relatively high asking prices for N9 units in good condition.

Fortunately I was able to acquire one just for the cost of shipping. As luck would have it, someone saw my tweets about the BlackBerry Passport I revived, and told me I could maybe have some fun with their old handset, which runs yet another OS. I thought they wanted to donate a Nokia Lumia 800, but it turned out to be an N9.

The phone is in very good condition, and with a battery that is still quite healthy, lasting almost two days on a single charge and with cellular and Wi-Fi connections enabled.

Quick Specifications

Introduction	Announced in June 2011, released in September 2011
Dimensions	Width: 61.2 mm — Height: 116.45 mm — Thickness: 7.6 to 12.1 mm
Weight	135 g
Display	3.9″ AMOLED, 16M colors, 854×480 pixels
CPU	Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 SoC that includes 3 processor units: 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU (for OS and apps); Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX530 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 2.0; 430 MHz TI TMS320C64x Digital Signal Processor (image processing for the camera, audio processing for telephony and data transmission)
Memory & Storage	1 GB RAM, 16 or 64 GB storage
Connectivity	GPS and A‑GPS, Compass, WLAN 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4 and 5 GHz), micro USB 2.0, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, NFC, FM receiver
Audio	3.5 mm audio jack; supported codecs: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, FLAC
Video	720P, H.263, H.264, MPEG‑4, WMV 9, Matroska
Camera	Rear: 8.7 MP AF camera with Carl Zeiss optics, dual-LED flash, wide-angle lens (ƒ/2.2, Focal length: 3.77mm / 28mm). Front: VGA resolution
Operating System	MeeGo 1.2 “Harmattan”

What makes it unique

While MeeGo is certainly an interesting OS, and the Nokia N9 appears to be the only handset featuring it, what really makes this device stand out is the design of the user interface and the whole user experience.

When the N9 was introduced, Nokia created an entire mini-site to illustrate the user interface and interaction design guidelines. Since 9 years have passed now, those materials aren’t accessible anymore. Fortunately the whole mini-site, complete with downloadable assets, has been preserved and mirrored by the owner of the n9.dy.fi website: Nokia N9 UX Guidelines

What I really love about the user interface is that it’s based on solid foundational principles that in turn guarantee a very consistent, predictable, intuitive user interface.

The Guidelines strike me as being concise, sharply-focused, clear and straightforward, and more importantly extremely thoughtful. They are indicative of a great deal of depth, and at every turn you get the feeling that all the people involved in the hardware and software design of the Nokia N9 had very clear ideas and goals in mind.

With all the gestures and gesture combinations we have to learn on current smartphones (iOS and Android alike), it’s truly refreshing to see how the purposefully limited set of gestures (mostly swipes — the swipe is at the core of the user interaction on the N9) you perform to navigate the N9 operating system, give you access to everything you need without becoming overwhelming. The core gestures are extremely easy to memorise, remain consistent everywhere, and are sufficiently distinct so that you don’t run the risk of doing something wrong or destructive by executing them partially or incorrectly.

Central to the user experience is the flow — eliminating as much friction as possible was clearly one of the goals here, and was entirely achieved with an effectiveness I haven’t seen anywhere else.

As I mentioned earlier, the swipe is the core gesture, and it’s how you access almost everything on the N9. The first thing you notice is that the N9 has no Home button or other physical or persistent software buttons for navigation. The only physical controls present on the device are Volume Up/Down buttons and a Power/Lock button located on the right side. Nothing else.

Like on Windows Phone handsets Nokia would introduce later, when the N9 is idle, time and notifications (such as new mail or app updates) are displayed persistently. The display is AMOLED, so this feature doesn’t impact battery life much. To wake the phone, you can either press the Power/Lock button or simply double-tap the screen. The screen becomes brighter, the lock screen wallpaper will appear, together with any notification that came when the phone was idle.

At this point, you can access the Applications screen by swiping down, or access the last view you were in by swiping right from the left edge:

 

Once in the Applications screen you can swipe right to access the Events screen, where you’ll find notifications and feeds; or you can swipe left to access the Open Applications screen, where you can multitask by switching from an open app to another, or quit apps you no longer use by selecting them. Open apps can be viewed on a 2×2 or 3×3 thumbnail grid. You make the thumbnail bigger or smaller by pinching in or out. The most recently used apps are always on top.

Another little touch that I love is that you can cycle through these three main screens simply by continuing to swipe. For instance, if you’re in the Open Applications screen, there is no need to swipe right twice to go back to the Events screen: you just swipe left once more. No matter the screen you’re in, you can keep swiping in either direction; it’s a carousel:

Events ↔︎ Applications ↔︎ Open Applications ↔︎ Events ↔︎ Applications … etc.

And that’s essentially it — you’re in these three main screens 95% of the time. Each of these screens doesn’t have ‘sub-screens’ or multiple pages. There isn’t a separate Notifications pane and Today view like on iOS. It’s all on the Events screen. The Applications screen is just one: as you install new applications, you just scroll down to find them. You can use folders to keep things tidier — and of course you can rearrange the apps in exactly the same manner as you do on iOS — but you don’t have separate pages like on Android or iOS. Scrolling is very fluid, so it’s not really a problem.

Judging by what I’ve told you so far, you might find this UI model limited or too inflexible, but I actually think that it’s very efficiently organised. The gesture language is minimal but consistent. The spatial arrangement is such that you intuitively know that moving left and right in the UI changes the view, while going down gives you more of each view, so to speak.

The two remaining parts of the user interface you can access are:

1. What Nokia calls the status menu. This is always accessible by tapping on the status bar (or status area, as Nokia calls it). When you tap it, it clicks like a button (it really gives you a haptic feedback). I love the design of the two volume sliders. Volume can be adjusted by tapping on the bar. Profile (ringer) also works with the phone’s volume buttons. As you lower it, the bar enters Beep and Silent status.

2. The quick launch bar. As the user manual explains, “In all applications, and even on the lock screen, you can easily make a call, or access the camera, web, or messages. When holding your phone upright, drag your finger from below the bottom of the screen onto the screen, and hold your finger in place, until the quick launch bar is displayed.” In practice, it feels like you start a meaningful, slow swipe from the bottom, and at one point you release and the launch bar pops up, as if you were uncovering something that was hidden under the bottom of the screen, if that makes sense.

Designing the UI around the swipe: today, it seems trivial. Swipes are everywhere, in every touch interface, on smartphones, tablets, smartwatches; but the Nokia N9 is the only device where this essential gesture is implemented in a natural, intuitive, cohesive, frictionless way. Take for example the act of dismissing an app when you’re done with it. You don’t need a button to return to the Home screen, but you also don’t need to remember how to swipe and which direction to swipe. You exit the app by swiping wherever you want — up, down, left, right, whatever is most comfortable at the moment.

Earlier I wrote that, once you unlock the phone, “you can access the Applications screen by swiping down, or access the last view you were in by swiping right from the left edge”, but the truth is you can access the last view you were in by swiping in any direction. This is consistent with the way you dismiss an app, because you’re essentially doing the same task — dismissing a UI layer you don’t need anymore.

Tone and language

There is an interesting section in the Getting Started part of the Nokia N9 UX Guidelines that gives the prospective developer of an N9 app some advice regarding the tone and language they should employ in their app. While I’m sure this kind of suggestions are present in the UI Guidelines of other operating systems, I just wanted to point out how sensible these are. Further, they easily apply to any system you’re developing for. Here are a couple of examples:

• The tone and language we use is straightforward and conversational. This means we avoid engineering terms, overly technical words, obscure acronyms and industry jargon.

• Nokia N9 is friendly — But it’s not overly friendly. […] [W]hile we encourage you to keep the UI strings short whenever possible, we do not recommend you do so at the expense of a more friendly tone. You need to make a judgement call between space and warmth. […] Having said that, we avoid exclamations like ‘oops’, ‘eek’, ‘oh dear’. Though these can add personality, they are too widely used and add to the on-screen word count. We’re always looking for a balance between brevity and cordiality.

Quick aside on the hardware

At this point I’m going to state the obvious: the Nokia N9 is the best smartphone I’ve ever handled when it comes to one-handed use. It’s no mystery that it’s designed from the ground up to be used with one hand, and it shows. Size-wise, this is a phone in the iPhone 5/5s/SE range. But the curved polycarbonate shell of the N9 is sculpted in such a way that it feels particularly great in the hand. It’s never cold to the touch, and it’s smooth without being slippery.

When introducing the N9 in 2011, Marko Ahtisaari (Nokia’s Head of Product Design at the time) said this about the phone’s body:

The body is precision-machined from a single piece of polycarbonate, in inherent colour. What ‘inherent colour’ means is that the polymer is coloured throughout; and that means if it scratches, it’s still the same beautiful [colour] that you see here.

When speaking of the material employed for the case, he also throws a quick jab at Apple’s iPhone 4 and the then-infamous ‘Antennagate’:

The polycarbonate is also good for another reason: it gives us extremely good antenna performance. So, unlike some competitor products, you don’t need to hold it in a special way to make reliable phone calls.

And while ‘Antennagate’ was a stupid thing that got blown out of proportion, I must say that I’ve been using my N9 with a secondary SIM card for a few months now, and both cellular coverage and call performance have been remarkably good.

Back to the software: the visual design

Unsurprisingly, the visual design of the user interface is as consistent and well-thought-out as the rest of the experience. I find the icon design particularly pleasing. Icons have a unique shape that’s been called squircle because it’s not a square (like on BlackBerry OS), it’s not a circle (like on Android), and it’s not even a square with rounded corners (like on iOS). If anything, it’s more like a circle that’s just starting to morph into a square.

As you can see in the image above, the icon’s æsthetic is an excellent mix of skeuomorphism and flat design, and I personally think it has aged very well. First-party app icons are tasteful, and I particularly like the added depth to the main pictogram, so that it nicely stands against the background without trying too hard to look tridimensional.

In the Launcher Icons Guidelines document, icons’ design and properties are outlined in detail with simplicity and precision:

 

 

Naturally, the squircle shape is a recurrent character throughout the system. It’s not just limited to icons (application icons, in-app icons, status area and lock screen icons, etc.), but it also appears in buttons, switches and sliders.

Another important element of the UI’s visual design is, of course, the system font. It is called Nokia Pure, and was specifically designed by the Dalton Maag type foundry. When the N9 was new, the font was used on the Nokia website and has been part of Nokia’s visual identity ever since.

I find it very nice to read, and remains legible even at very small sizes. If you download the Toolkit in the Downloads menu of the Getting Started section of the Nokia N9 UX Guidelines, you’ll get the whole Nokia N9 UI as Adobe Illustrator files, plus a folder containing the three weights (regular, bold, light) of the Nokia Pure font in TrueType format.

Some examples of nice UI touches

How did I take these screenshots? The Nokia N9, surprisingly, doesn’t have a built-in action to capture screenshots. I found a cool app, ShotMee, that you open and keep in the background; when you need to take a screenshot, you double tap the phone on the right side. That’s right: the phone, not the screen!

 

The status area. I love the design of the two volume sliders. Volume can be adjusted by tapping on the bar. Profile (ringer) also works with the phone’s volume buttons. As you lower it, the bar enters Beep and Silent status.

 

Part of the camera settings. The N9 camera app features a fair amount of manual controls and the experience resembles more that of a compact digital camera than a smartphone camera. You can manually select the ISO (range is 100–800), aspect ratio (16:9, 4:3, 3:2), and resolution. You can also toggle Face detection and Continuous shutter.

UI-wise, you can appreciate once again the consistency of the icon design, and the clear contrast between the active and inactive states of a button.

 

Mail app — List view and Message view. Nothing groundbreaking, just a simple, effective interface. The Nokia Pure font is quite readable even at this size. The contact’s profile icon and the Back button are, again, a squircle. The toolbar icons are tasteful and unambiguous.

 

Clock app — Alarm view. Once again, a clean and simple design that allows you to set the alarm time with just one hand without friction. The Hour and Minute circular sliders are exactly where your thumb will be. Notice also how the subtle shadows give just the right amount of depth to the UI elements, striking a good balance between skeuomorphism and complete flatness. On a more curious note, the Clock app doesn’t feature a stopwatch or timer.

 

To transfer files, pictures and music on the Nokia N9, you just connect it via USB to your computer and access the relevant folders. Just like you did with, say, the Palm Prē. It’s the simplest method and doesn’t require dedicated apps. By the way, when I connected the N9 to my Macs, I was pleasantly surprised to see it was given its correct icon!

 

Music app. This is the typical interface when an album is playing. Nokia was doing ‘dark mode, whoa!’ in 2011 already.

 

You want to see the other songs in this album? You tap once on the artwork and the track list appears.

 

When you tap the Back button (←), you return to the Music app’s ‘main’ page, showing the various album artworks. If an artwork image is not available, one is created using the album title and an accent colour. Much better than a generic ‘music note’ icon. Notice also how you can still see which track from which album is playing at the moment (Morphine’s You Look Like Rain in this case).

 

When you’re playing music and you wake the device, a minimal controller will appear on the lock screen.

Is it still usable today?

This, admittedly, is the less exciting part. It’s a 2011 smartphone, but the fact that it’s a 9‑year-old phone isn’t really problematic per se. I also own an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4s — introduced in 2010 and 2011 respectively — and when it comes to ‘things that still work’, they’re both more usable than the N9. That’s due to their software. I may have become very critical of Apple in the past few years, but one thing is undeniable: iOS is the mobile operating system that has aged better of all, functionality-wise. Take any other smartphone from ten years ago, with any mobile OS version it supported at the time (BlackBerry, Android, webOS…) — you won’t get much done with it, as is.

The Nokia N9 is on this same boat. You’ll have to tinker if you want to restore some of its functionality. The N9 is the only handset that came with the MeeGo ‘Harmattan’ OS. It was just before Nokia switched to Windows Phone. Support was dropped soon. If you acquire an N9 today, you’ll soon find out that, out of the box:

• All features relying on Nokia services don’t work. So, for example, forget Maps and driving directions, and forget Nokia’s app store or music store.
• When inserting a SIM card, the N9 will prompt you to connect to your Nokia account. But since you can’t create a Nokia account anymore, that is going to be problematic.
• Social network clients that came built-in, such as Twitter and Facebook, won’t work because they make use of now-deprecated APIs. Same for services like AccuWeather, Skype, Dropbox, Flickr, YouTube, etc.
• Web browsing is going to be hit-or-miss. Lots of websites relying on secure connections with modern protocols won’t load.
• If you acquire an N9 with an older version of the OS (the last was MeeGo Harmattan 1.3), the phone may tell you that there’s an update available, but since the Nokia servers delivering such updates are now unreachable, you won’t be able to just update it over the air.

I’ve probably forgotten other issues, but I’d say these are the bigger ones you’ll encounter first, and may sour your initial experience with the device. If you want to leave your N9 untouched because you don’t feel like applying a few mild hacks to make some stuff work, and you’re just curious about the UI and the general feel of the N9, you can still use the device in a limited way. Mail should work (Gmail is giving me problems recently, but up until January it was working), the Music and Video apps work. Basic Web browsing is feasible. Calendar, Clock, Contacts, Messages, Camera, Calculator, Documents (a nice document viewer), Feeds and Notes all work. Not much, but better than nothing. At the very least you can use it as a pocket camera, MP3 player, and alarm clock.

Since I always wish to put vintage devices to good use, I was willing to tinker a bit to make my N9 more usable. The problem is that I did the majority of fixes and workarounds the very first days I received the phone, at the beginning of November 2019, and I was so excited and eager to make the most of this N9 that I forgot to take notes of everything I did. As soon as I have some time, I’ll be writing another piece on the various steps to perform to ‘revive’ the N9 so that it can be more useful today. Meanwhile, an essential starting point is this page: Resurrect Your N9.

Media

• The announcement video.
• Marko Ahtisaari: A brief overview of the design of Nokia N9.
• How it’s made — Nokia N9 Journey.
• Show Yourself — Nokia N9 retail ad.
• The Nokia Play 360, a Bluetooth speaker for the N9. The instant pairing via NFC technology is cool, and you could also use two speakers together for a full stereo experience.
• Marko Ahtissari introduces the Nokia N9 at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore, 21 June 2011 — I’ve found two videos on YouTube, neither has great video quality but are both watchable: this version has a slightly better video quality, while this other version has been edited to insert the slides Ahtissari was showing to the audience, which aren’t really visible in the videos.

 

Final thoughts

Now that I finally own a Nokia N9, I understand why I always get some kind of enthusiastic feedback when I mention it. I’ve been really blown away by the sheer amount of great user interface ideas and by its tight hardware/software integration reminding me of the ‘good’ Apple of a few years ago.

It’s truly a pity that this device was sort of doomed from the beginning. As the Wikipedia entry for the N9 states, “Nokia planned in 2010 to make MeeGo their flagship smartphone platform, replacing Symbian, whose N8 flagship launched that year. Thus effectively N9 was originally meant to be the flagship device from the company. On 11 February 2011 Nokia partnered with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7 as the flagship operating system to replace Symbian, with MeeGo also sidelined. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop promised to still ship one MeeGo device that year, which would end up as the N9.”

I’ve grown to know and love Windows Phone as a mobile operating system, and I’ve already said that, in some aspects of its user interface, it was more innovative than Android or iOS. However once you reflect on the history of the Nokia N9 and MeeGo, you can’t help but think about what would have happened if things had gone differently; if Nokia didn’t partner with Microsoft and kept developing other MeeGo smartphones with the same, excellent user interface as the N9.

Whenever I pick up my N9, feel it in the hand, wake it up and use it, everything about it just clicks. The care and thought that went into the entire design of this device, from the hardware to the software, is so evident it somehow hurts that this device had such a limited lifespan and success when it was available. It hurts when you use mainstream platforms like iOS and Android and stumble onto gestures, features, and UI ideas that feel so clearly bolted on, or inconsistent, or simply poorly designed and frustrating to execute — and then you go back to this 9‑year-old smartphone and everything feels so tight and coherent.

(In case you were wondering: In my day-to-day, I usually carry more than one smartphone. My main unit is still an iPhone, but I typically have another handset with me. And since I now have accumulated a fair amount of devices from other platforms, they’re on rotation. I’ll have the Nokia Lumia 1020 with Windows Phone 8.1 for a few days, then switch to the BlackBerry Passport, then to the Palm Prē 2, then to the Nokia Lumia 830 with Windows Mobile 10, then to the Nokia N9, etc. But the N9 feels so great to have around that I found myself keeping it with me anyway. So yes, sometimes I’ll have three phones with me and maybe even an older iPod as well. I’m fine, there’s no need for an intervention.)

But it’s not all lost. Fortunately, many of the concepts of MeeGo’s swipe-based UI live on in Sailfish OS, another linux-based OS developed by Jolla, a Finnish tech company. As noted in its Wikipedia entry, “The OS is an evolved continuation of the Linux MeeGo OS previously developed by alliance of Nokia and Intel which itself relies on combined Maemo and Moblin. The MeeGo legacy is contained in the Mer core in about 80% of its code; the Mer name thus expands to MEego Reconstructed. This base is extended by Jolla with a custom user interface and default applications. Jolla and MERproject.org follow a meritocratic system to avoid the mistakes that led to the MeeGo project’s then-unanticipated discontinuation.”

Still, I wish Sailfish OS were less of a niche system than it currently is. Android and iOS need competition. All the mobile operating systems that tried being an alternative failed mainly due to the Not Many Apps syndrome, and at the same time every one of them had at least some features or some UI concepts that were much more interesting and innovative than Android and iOS. (And, as we’ve seen, the Nokia N9 has many of these). It’s a very frustrating pattern. Meanwhile, the iOS/Android duopoly has slowed down innovation in mobile operating systems and in their UI in particular. Think about the last four or five releases of iOS and Android: a lot of iteration and refinements, in some cases verging on more complication and feature creep, and a lot of ‘playing safe’ overall.

Anyway, I’d really love to try installing Sailfish OS on a compatible handset and explore the user interface. It appears that it can be installed on smartphones such as Sony’s Xperia X and XA2. If you own such a device, or another in the list included in Sailfish OS’s Wikipedia entry, and you don’t use it anymore, let me know if you’re willing to donate it. I’ll certainly document my experience here on this blog.