Nokia has come under fire of late for a lack of innovation, but the Nokia N9 does have one rather striking difference to most other smartphones on the market – no buttons on the front at all.
Even the iPhone has to have a single Home button to get you back to its app launcher but the designers of the N9 reckon a simple swipe gesture will do the job just as well. Dragging a finger to the edge of the screen in any app will pop you back to the main launcher interface and any widgets you might have placed there.
The phone is one of the first to run run the Linux-derived MeeGo 1.2 operating system and Nokia has added its own ‘Harmattan’ UI on top, based around 3 home screens that can be switched between with a flick gesture. There are still a couple of buttons on the device – a volume rocker, power switch and a camera shutter key for that nice Carl Zeiss lensed 8MP camera.
Its a bit of an experiment for Nokia and we are certainly more interested in this than we have been for the last few Symbian-powered devices. How Nokia will square producing MeeGo devices with its plans for Windows Phone 7 is still to be revealed.
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