Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Nokia N9: Not ready for prime time, but will it ever be?

I have had a Nokia N9 for a few days now, and whilst it's a good phone overall, it lacks enough polish, in terms of both hardware and software, to make it a great phone.
(I won't get into a general review of the phone, for there has been many written about it: see here at Engadget, or here at Gizmodo Australia.)
I wanted to test it since it was released to the public; its 'predecessor', the venerable Nokia N900, has been a trusty companion for some years, up until the varnish on the screen began to peel off, forcing me to find a replacement. Since then I use an iPhone 4S, working in conjunction with the MacBook Air and other devices.
 
The reason I bought it is 1. I finally got paid, and 2. Amazon.de, the German Amazon store, sells it for what amounts to about $375, compared to the $655 it would have cost me on Amazon.fr. But honestly, I just wanted to test that device.


Hardware side, my grief lies mostly in the touch screen. Waking up the phone, apart from pushing the side button (there are no buttons on the front of the phone), takes a quick double-tap on the screen, that often wouldn't wake up the phone, making me do it twice or three times to unlock the screen. Once unlocked, the swipe gesture works well, from the applications screen to the open windows to the notifications and feed page.

Now I don't know if I should classify this as a hardware or a software bug, so I'll leave it here : I commute to work by bus, every morning. It's not a long ride: I live about 30 minutes away from work, of which about 15 are spent in said bus (depending, of course, of the traffic). During these 15 minutes, I like to check my (e)mail, read the news, have a look at the New York Times front page or consult the excellent NextDraft, written by Dave Pell. On my first bus trip with the new phone, it refused to update my mailboxes. I don't know why, I really don't know. The network indicators were not reporting any problem, the phone seemed to be connected in 3.5G (HSDPA), and able to exchange information with the mobile network. I had to reboot.
I wouldn't have thought more of it, but it happened just the day after, in the middle of the day, at the office. I don't work in a Second World War bunker, nor do I work in a cave, so the reception was, again, very good. I rebooted, to find that the battery was nearly depleted. Good thing it has a micro-USB port, contrary to *ahem* the iPhone.

Software-side, what I really like about the phone is that Nokia tried to capitalize on the development of the previous OS, Maemo, later merged with the MeeGo platform. The history of these two OS are worth a read, Intel, Samsung and Nokia having done great work on the user interface and user experience. The 'MeeGo feel' is all over the Nokia N9 and its rounded windows, icons and fonts, culminating in what Nokia calls the 'swipe' interface. It works really well. I found a general responsiveness in most of the UI, which is worth considering in spite of the 1Ghz ARM Cortex A8 system-on-chip used, and contrary to the ever-laggy (in my opinion) Android-powered phones and their multiple core architecture.

I love (as in the N900) the tight integration across the device of multiple accounts, from SIP to Facebook, Twitter, Skype, or the Google Accounts. Once configured in the 'Accounts' application, the phone application can dial directly via the operator or via SIP, for example. Same for the Google accounts : once configured, you have the option to also sync your Google Calendar to the main calendar application, etc.
The user also has the choice of having the contacts of each service appear in the main contact application, thus allowing Skype calls from the main phone application. Now I'd like to see that on the iPhone, forcing the use of third-party software (namely Linphone) to use a SIP account.

You can really configure to your liking the 'feed', appearing under the notifications screen. It can show content from the accounts you set up.

Now for the software bugs that plagued my experience. First of all, I had to reboot, once, after having inserted my SIM-card. The phone refused to detect any phone network before that. The iPhone stays on all the time, allowing a hotswap of the SIM card. I would have been ok with it (after all, I don't swap SIM cards that often), but it happened to me twice in the next two days. Finding that you hadn't received a call because the phone decided to disconnect from the network should not be part of any user experience.

Another strange software bug : someone left me a voice message, the other day. In the notification screen, a little icon appeared, showing a message with the 'tape' icon. Well, it didn't go away once I called my message center and heard the message. And the 'clear' option that appears when you have notifications was grayed, so that notification stayed on the home screen too. Bad, bad, bad.


All in all, the real question is not when or if the phone will be ready for prime time: it has not been designed to. It has been designed to appeal to the geek crowd, but it even fails that promise. Maybe some other software developments will help: I was very surprised, and in a good way, by what the folks at Jolla are doing with their Sailfish OS. See this Engadget article, where they do a 'hands-on' with the OS, to see pictures and watch a video on the project.
They are building their OS upon Mer, itself a fork of MeeGo ("If you're wondering why the mobile OS is usually shown running on Nokia's N950 developer handset, that's because Jolla employs many ex-MeeGo engineers, so the OMAP-based phone was a natural fit", the article says).

I tried Mer (well specifically Plasma Active, built on it) on the famous WeTab, and was really pleased with that incarnation of Mer / MeeGo. So I look forward to be able to try the Jolla Sailfish OS on the N9. Or, for that matter, the Firefox OS being built by the Mozilla Foundation!