For some time now I’ve been growing increasingly dissatisfied with my Nexus S. Those of you who follow me on Google+ may have seen a number of discussions on this point. So I was thinking about a new phone, and here I’ll lay out my thoughts.
Warning: this will be long.
Obviously the choice is between iPhone and Android. Now, I’ve been an Android user for some years now; started with the HTC Hero, then a Google Nexus One, then (when I fell over while I was drunkit was icy on Christmas Eve), a Google Nexus S. My desire for the Nexus line was because I don’t particularly like the “added value” that Android vendors add to their phones, and because Nexus phones, because they’re from Google themselves, are designed to exhibit the latest cool stuff in a given Android release and therefore get that Android release before other stuff.
So, iPhone or Android? Android or iPhone? Much thought went into this process.
And then I bought a Nokia N9, which runs Meego of all things, a mobile OS which is neither iOS nor Android.
Herewith, a conversation between me and interlocutors both real and imaginary to try and answer a bunch of questions about my mobile phone choices. I should note up front (and this is important): I am not trying to convince anyone else of anything here. This is what I think, and why. If you read this as me telling you that your choices for yourself are wrong, then you’re misreading it. But feel free to read it as me telling you why your choices for me are wrong, and then feel free to disagree if you want.
You did what? What the hell is an “N9″?
Before Nokia got into bed with Windows Phone 7, and believing that Symbian wasn’t really up to the challenge of modern smartphones, they made their own mobile phone touchscreen OS, called Maemo. Then they partnered with Intel and turned that into “Meego”. Then, both companies dropped the project, pretty much; Nokia went into Windows Phone, and Intel are doing something called Tizen. But in that brief interregnum Nokia released a phone called the N9, which ran this Meego thing (and a phone called the N950, which was an N9 with a hardware keyboard and was aimed at developers).
The phone itself is beautiful, too. It feels the right weight in my hand, it’s blue rather than boring black, the screen’s precise and sharp, and it doesn’t have old-Android-esque hardware buttons because it doesn’t need them. Like it, a lot.
Why get some obscure phone, though? The market is all Android and iOS.
Interestingly, it turns out that I don’t really care about the market, here, because where the market is means two things: further development of the OS, and quantity of apps available for the phone. And I just don’t use that many apps. I’ve had a smartphone probably as long as you have, gentle reader, and I was trying to batter previous phones into being smart-ish enough to let me read books and see the web before that. I don’t say this to somehow push geekier-than-thou credentials, but to show that I have a number of years of my own smartphone usage to analyse. And that has shown me that I primarily use the following things, in roughly descending order of usage: a web browser, Twitter, an epub reader, email, an audiobook reader, a music player, a calendar, wakeup alarms, a camera, Google+, Foursquare, Google Reader, a remote for my bedroom media TV, Youtube, SMS messaging, Shazam, and a couple of little games to while away spare minutes when I don’t fancy reading. And that’s, basically, it. I had tens of apps installed on my Nexus S and they just didn’t get used.
And, importantly, every phone in the world either has those things as native apps or, tantalisingly, they’re available as web apps. I did a talk a couple of weeks ago at a Multipack Presents session in Birmingham where I exhorted mobile app developers to consider building web apps when they can, instead of leaping for a native app and limiting themselves to one platform, and this was a chance to try practising what I had preached.
Web apps? They just aren’t as good as native apps, man.
That’s part of what I’m investigating, here. I’m using the web for, from the above list, the web browser (obviously), Twitter, email, Google+, Foursquare, Google Reader, my XBMC remote, and YouTube. I’ll also be using it, soon, as my music player and audiobook reader and epub reader, but I need to write those first 
Part of the reason I’m trying to use web apps for this stuff is exactly to discover what the limitations are. One pretty big one is: a web app can’t do things while it isn’t running. Another one, which has become pretty clear to me over the last week, is that Android’s support for using a web app like a real app is really annoying; “installing” a webapp by bookmarking it to your home screen is irritating, and Android has a bad habit of just opening that bookmark like a web page in the browser, not like a separate app. Finally, while the promise of the web is that it can talk to native things and work with non-web stuff, that’s not really there yet; it’d be impossible to implement Shazam on the web, without Flash, right now, although it’s getting there. The Nokia “Browser 8.5″ is excellent; it appears to be pretty much just as up-to-date with supporting modern web stuff as Android or iOS, it’s webkit-based, and even if it wasn’t there’s a preliminary build of Opera Mobile, so that’s all OK.
But, in general, I’m finding the experience of using web apps only a little behind the native experience for well-written careful native apps, and as far as I can see, a lot of that delta is because we just don’t have as much experience writing apps which work brilliantly in a mobile browser; we’re still working it out. So I’m happy using the web.
Why are you not using an iPhone? Everyone except geeks has an iPhone
Main reason is this: no-one can convincingly say that I will never, ever, ever need iTunes. Recent versions of iOS are much better in this regard — updates are over-the-air now, for example, and initial registration doesn’t need iTunes any more — but when I asked questions like “what if my iPhone breaks? Do I have to plug it in and do an iTunes thing? What if I take it into the Apple store and tell them I don’t have iTunes?” I didn’t get very convincing “no, you will never need iTunes” answers. Maybe it really is true that I don’t need it and I just didn’t hear from the right people; maybe it isn’t quite true yet but will be in iOS 6. I’ll doubtless be looking at a new phone again in a year; convince me then.
Small side issue: as far as I can tell, it is not possible for me to make apps for iOS without a Mac. Not even PhoneGap apps.
You can have iTunes; just dual-boot into Windows or buy a Mac and run OS X and then run Ubuntu in a virtual machine
No thanks. I’m an Ubuntu user. Not interested in running anything else. I have noticed that a fair few Ubuntu users who also have iPhones aren’t really Ubuntu users; they’re OS X users who also run Ubuntu sometimes. That isn’t me.
You don’t need iTunes; just download libiphoneconnectorframework from github and then gtk-make-my-iphone-work from this Sourceforge site and then compile this kernel module to connect and…
No thanks. I’m sure that it probably is possible to have a totally iTunes-less life of iOS with entirely open-source stuff, and I completely respect the people working on that, but I’m just not interested in fighting to make my hardware work. My days of doing that are past. It’s not you, it’s me.
Why are you not using Android? ICS 4.0 is great!
I didn’t like ICS. My Nexus S has not yet had an official rollout of Android 4.0, which is annoying in itself, by the way; it’s only a year old! It’s the next-most-recent Nexus model! It’s officially Google-branded! Why can’t it run the latest Android OS! Grr! But ignoring that, there was an unofficial build, which was the official build until it turned out that there were battery life problems with it. So I installed that. Now, I had battery life problems, indeed (serious ones; I’d walk out the door with my phone fully charged at 7pm and sit in the pub drinking and playing on Twitter and the phone would be dead by midnight, which is unacceptable), but I’ve been convinced that they are a bug and not a fundamental problem. My fundamental problem with Android, now, is this: I don’t like the direction it’s going, and I found ICS uninspiring and disparate and bitty and incohesive*.
What do you mean, incohesive? ICS has had a full makeover!
No it hasn’t, and that’s the point. There are some nicer design elements in Android 4.0, but they only show up in some places. Most apps don’t use them. It’s still totally unclear what the back button will do in an app. Some apps have ICSed themselves and therefore don’t use the hardware buttons any more; others have not yet made the move; others still seem to try to detect whether I have hardware buttons and use them if so. I am sure it is possible to make a beautifully consistent set of applications for Android, but it just hasn’t happened; Android has the same problem that Linux always had, that for a long time there was no strong design lead-by-example, and now that there is you still have large portions of the Android community who don’t like it, don’t want to fit in with it, and consider that a virtue. Perhaps it is a virtue, but not for me. The much vaunted Android “fragmentation” makes this a little more difficult; it is harder to write an Android app when you have to do extra work to design Back functions into your UI if there’s no hardware button, and not if there is, but I don’t think fragmentation of hardware is the real issue; fragmentation of design aesthetic is the problem, and there is very little indication that the Android app dev community want to fix that, even if Google’s design team do. Again, you may consider this a feature rather than a bug, and that’s fine; I do not.
But Android is Linux! It’s the great hope for open source! You should use it!
My N9′s Linux, too. And it’s a lot more similar to my Ubuntu machine than Android is. Apps use D-Bus, they can be written in Python if you want, the widget set is Qt, etc, etc. Lots of open-source-desktop stuff in there.
Oh so you’re using this Meego thing because you’re a freetard?
Nope. I looked at the phones available to me, and the N9 came up on top, for reasons that this exceptionally long set of Q&As attempt to outline. That the system is, under the covers, pretty similar to my Ubuntu machine was a factor, but a relatively small one; what I found most compelling about that was that I was pretty confident that it’d work with Ubuntu without problems, which has indeed turned out to be the case. That it’s “Linux” qua Linux didn’t really enter into it.
Meego’s abandonware and unmaintained. Why are you tying yourself to a dying or already dead OS?
Now, that’s an interesting point. There seems to be a fairly vibrant, although small, developer community, and there seems to be a group at Nokia still working on this; a few days ago I received, OTA, the latest new version of Meego. It’s also excellently documented; the web apps documentation in particular was a hugely motivating factor in convincing me before purchase that the N9 would do what I want.
That’s not what I meant. It’s basically maintained by the community. That’s no good.
So is Android, dude. Like I said above, there is no official Android 4.0 for my Nexus S, the flagship Google phone until about three months ago. Let alone my daughter’s LG Optimus One, which still has Android 2.2 (or possibly even 2.1, I’m not sure) and no sign whatsoever of getting an upgrade. I used to be relatively confident that sticking with the Nexus line would get me the new shiny, and now I am not; the Nexus One doesn’t have ICS, the Nexus S doesn’t have ICS, which means buying a brand new Galaxy Nexus to get it… and presumably buying a Nexus Next Generation a year from now to get Android 5.0 Jelly Bean.
Yes, I can use a custom ROM; I can install Cyanogen and get updated Android versions, I can download one of a zillion ports from XDA. But then… that’s a community maintained version of the OS, no? Just like Meego is.
I need Android because I’m tightly wedded to the Google ecosystem. Aren’t you?
Well, my N9 is perfectly happily using mail, calendars, contacts, RSS reading, and Plus from Google. What else does it need? It’s a little easier to set up on Android, I’ll certainly admit that — sign in once, and everything works, and that’s lovely — but it wasn’t hard on the N9 either.
It’s not just iPhone and Android. Why aren’t you using WebOS/Windows Phone 7/Blackberry/Boot2Gecko/Symbian/something?
PalmHP webOS: I like webOS a lot, but you cannot buy it on a phone without a hardware keyboard. I hate hardware keyboards. Sorry.
Blackberry: Hardware keyboard, again. I also didn’t investigate Blackberry all that hard; there is an idea in my head that there is a Blackberry without keyboard and with a modern browser, and that would have been an alternative. Let me know if there is.
Windows Phone 7: I like Windows Phone 7 a great, great deal, and I came very close to buying a phone with it on. One of the things I really like about it, like webOS, is that it’s not just an iOS copy like I think Android largely is; they sat down and thought about a new and interesting way to work with a phone, and they did in my opinion a damned good job. I find WP7 easy to use and beautiful, and I was very tempted. But… it does not work well with Ubuntu. You can’t even plug it in to an Ubuntu laptop and copy files onto the phone; it doesn’t use MTP (which everyone knows how to talk, even if imperfectly) but some weird undocumented Microsoft extension called “mtp-z” which we have no idea how to use, and some bloke is having to reverse-engineer on github. Of course there is a Windows driver, and there’s a “Mac connector”, but nothing for Ubuntu. It’s also, like the iPhone, as far as I can tell impossible to build apps (even PhoneGap apps) for it without a Windows machine. So, no. I tried talking to an MS guy about this at CES, and he was all “no we do Windows and the Mac and that’s it, so you’re out of luck, goodbye”. So, goodbye, Windows Phone. For extra credit, the best WP7 phone on the market right now is the Nokia Lumia 800, which is… my N9 with Windows hardware buttons on it.
Symbian: it can, in theory, do everything I want; I had a Nokia E50 before I went Android. But it’s in my opinion just not up to the challenge of running a slick touchscreen experience.
Ubuntu Phone: doesn’t exist yet.
Boot2Gecko: does not exist as a phone I can buy, yet. Ignoring that I’m a bit disappointed that the UI is just an Android copy, for now, maybe I’ll get a B2G phone in a year when the phone exists. I like the mentality underlying it a lot.
OK, so I can see how you, Stuart, find the N9 a good fit for what you want. So, what’s wrong with it?
Well… here’s a list of things I’ve found to be less than perfect in my first two weeks of use. Here’s hoping the software ones, at least, get fixed.
It doesn’t do HTML5 audio. Or, rather, now that I have had the latest version of Meego sent to me OTA, it sort of does; an audio element becomes a button which you can press, and which opens up a full-screen audio player rather like the full-screen video player. Which is of course sod all use if you’re trying to build an HTML-based audio player or audiobook player. Grr.
The text selection stuff is not great. Weirdly, it seems like bits of the N9 know how to do this right; you get a little magnifying glass showing where your finger is, and you can move the cursor perfectly, but most text fields don’t do this. WTF, Nokia?
No Shazam. 
No PhoneGap port, yet, although a bloke is working on it, hooray!
The outside buttons (power, volume) feel a tiny bit more flimsy than they should.
It’s a sealed unit, so I can’t put in a new battery. Honestly, this doesn’t actually bother me, but maybe it will in the future. Gonna get one of those in-the-pocket charging thingies, so that’ll alleviate that problem. Recommendations for good ones are invited.
No Ubuntu One port, yet, so I’m using the website. I shall be fixing this (see complaints about HTML5 audio and no PhoneGap port for why I have not already done so; I’m working on it. 
)
You didn’t answer my question…
Go ahead and ask it. I’ll try.
Good choice. And not only because it is a geek choice, the phone is quite good, although I have some doubts about Meego’s usability. On the other hand, I haven’t used it much and it was on a Nokia N950.
My current phones are a Nokia N900 running Maemo (it’s an amazing piece of technological geekdom, love it) and, since last week, a Palm Pre 2 running webOS. I was truly surprised by the overall quality of webOS, but I understand that the form factor of the phone may not be the best. It’s still very good, though.
Henrique: yeah, I really like webos. If there were a keyboardless phone with it on, I’d almost certainly have gone for it.
Meego’s usability: so far, I’ve found it excellent, which is nice
You keep saying Meego, but you should actually be saying Maemo 6. The OS is still Maemo, just with some APIs so that they got to lend the MeeGo brand.
I feel the same as you (me being an Android user), this nokia is “more open-source” than Android, which is good for us. I tried the phone for 10min and i my feeling was excelent it turns it’s much more smoother than android. The only problem i see is that nokia can abandon the support (updates, etc…) for the next months/years.
Btw… is there official google applications like google plus ?
foo: Nokia call it Meego. I personally just refer to my phone as the N9, and when googling for tips for it I’ll look for “n9 audiobook reader”, not “meego audiobook reader” or “maemo audiobook reader”. I don’t have a dog in this fight.
Re the “Small side issue”: there is Mono Touch (http://xamarin.com/monotouch) if you’re comfortable with C#.
Luis: there’s no Google+ application, but the web version works fine and looks and feels like a native app. I agree, a bit, on the support worry, but as mentioned I don’t think that Android is any better on this front, for any specific phone.
Peter Judge: Monotouch isn’t available for Ubuntu, as far as I can see; it’s Windows and OSX only. Even if it were, I don’t believe it’s possible to create an iOS app without signing up for various developer key things, which need OS X.
If you haven’t discovered it already I’d recommend grabbing the Apps For Meego installer from http://apps.formeego.org
It provides only free/open source software and has a number of interesting hacks included (such as getting calendar information in the events feed, or enabling power saving from the home screen), and I’ve generally found it to have a much higher ratio of interesting stuff than the Nokia store.
You might also want to check out the excellent community build servers at: https://build.pub.meego.com/
Also, an Ubuntu One client would be really nice. I had a go at installing various components of the desktop client early on with a view to adapting it to be N9 friendly but ran into some issues and never got around to looking into it further, so I’d certainly be excited to see a proper client developed.
Wow, how can someone not like ICS? It rocks hard.
Yeah, it rocks hard, in terms of looks, but not very much phones run ICS smoothly. Also, I am starting despise the Android task management technique.
BTW, Optimus One has got and official upgrade to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) when talking of manufacturer support and stuff.
Mike: I have it. Not many apps
Thomas: each to their own.
Thanks for the review! I will take your experience into account when I get my next palmtop-computer-that-also-does-phonecalls.
I don’t love my Android devices either (I have the Galaxy Nexus and a Transformer). I agree with most of your points except this one:
> Well, my N9 is perfectly happily using mail, calendars, contacts, RSS reading, and Plus from Google. What else does it need?
This is the killer app for Android, the google apps. I’ve yet to see a Mail, Calendar, or Contact app on any phone that can even come close to the Google Android apps. GMail in ICS is pretty phenomenal, when I’m travelling I have my Priority Inbox right there, the pinch to zoom on my calendar, it’s nice.
Maybe it’s a European thing or something but in the US I rarely if ever see a Nokia device, if I do it’s when hanging out with Europeans visiting.
After having a Nokia N900 for the best part of a year, then trying Android for the first time, it felt very much like going back to the bad old world of iffy windows free/shareware (cr)apps, and although I now have an HTC Sensation (with latest custom ICS ROM), I still miss the feeling of really being in control of (or at least the familiarity of) the OS running on my phone/pocket computer. Real pity Meego/Maemo has lost official support as there was *some* hope it could take off..
That said I’m not certain that I really need a Linux computer in my pocket when basically any phone with a browser & terminal (and dialer!) should do, but the potential for great 3rd party operating systems is huge, after all many of us run some sort of *nix on our PCs which lets face it, weren’t designed with Linux in mind! Why limit yourself to running the OS the manufacturer supplies with it? Well Apple can tell you all about that!
And then there is Google. And my data. And the 225% increase in Android malware last year (don’t ask me to reference that!) And the underlying feeling that I will wake up one day to find it has all been stolen by some clever coder in some far away place…
Ultimately I like your choice a lot, but next year or whenever you have to choose another phone (if we still use them as they are now then?!) I doubt Maemo will be an option leaving you with…??
I really hope Tizen will take off at some point, the successor of maemo/meego. With the backing by Samsung and Intel, this could be an open system backed by big vendors. I would be the first to buy one.
I’ve been waiting for an open phone platform since I heard of Openmoko five years ago. Hoped for Android, but that seems to be failing more and more.
Now I’m waiting for an Xperia S to arrive, after my Xperia Arc died in a drunken accident..
Question that you probably can’t answer: how well does it work with MS Exchange email?
jorge: I certainly admit that the Android Gmail app is excellent. The calendar… the N9 calendar seems fine to me. And the contacts list I use for one and only one thing: finding a person and then ringing them or sending them a text message. Perhaps if I did more with it I’d appreciate the Android one more? On the US vs European point… this is one of the reasons why the tech media is all “there are no phones but iOS and Android”, because Nokia never got anywhere in the US even though they’re the biggest phone manufacturer by miles, and the tech media’s all US-centric
Acesabe: I’m sure that my opinions will have changed a year from now, but that’s a year from now. If I were able to know the state of the mobile market twelve months ahead I’d be very rich
Bas: no idea about Exchange, I’m afraid, although it has a “Mail for Exchange” thing, so I assume it at least tries to work.
Can you reflash the n9 using linux?
Personally, I really hope that Alien Dalvik gets off the ground. I have the same opinions you do about apps, and my N900 meets my current needs (as would an N950, if I could buy one; I require a hardware keyboard), but I do have precisely one Android app I’d like to run: Netflix.
Hey there,
Please don’t use the word “freetard” in your posts or anywhere else. It’s offensive.
Is it any good as a phone? IE is the battery life good, can you hear people clearly, can you actually talk to your mum without cutting her off because your cheek rubs against the finish call button?
Well unlike many here I used Meego for long enough and liked it but liked Moblin (it’s predecessor) better. It was a good system and worked really well on netbooks and when the N9 came out it looked really beautiful and much nicer than Iphone clones etc. However I had not enough money to buy one which was a real shame and it seems still active so keep it running as long as it still update.
Truth number 1 = When I finally got an android through work I hacked it to look like an N9
Truth number 2 = I actually do miss the meego/moblin way of things although I would automatically love to have an Ubuntu or Unity phone….the Meego stuff was starting to look really really good until windows and lumia turned up and ruined it all…and look sh*ite as well.
anonim: I don’t know. The Meego 1.2 update arrived over-the-air.
Anonymous: I’m not sure that trying to run something like Netflix, where the app producer goes to great lengths to stop people running it on platforms other than those supported, is going to be an idea with any sticking power in the long run. If Netflix is that important to you I’d recommend getting a platform they support, I’m afraid.
Little Girl: I was attempting to capture the flavour of the accusation which comes from the sorts of people who make that sort of accusation, which happens a lot.
Alistair Munro: it seems to be, so far, although I’ve only had about two calls on it
Stuart, you’re so mainstream. Real underdogs go with WebOS
Yeah well, the text selection thingy … at least it works in the browser now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSPtWE0rwyg&feature=plcp&context=C31286c3UDOEgsToPDskJ1BznQW_5FdOsg1Ddrl8gv
I hope you’ll enjoy your N9, for the foreseeable future at least.
Thanks for the great post. I have been on the fence for a while about which phone I should get, for very similar reasons as you.
The N9 has always ‘felt’ right but there was always the unsupported-ness thing going on in the back of my head. But your right, Android isn’t any more supported than the N9.
jimmac: I know, I know.
If HP would just make a phone without a hardware keyboard…
Hum, am I the real underdog that I’ve got myself Pre 3 in November?
Actually, I would happily get N9 as well, except that it lacks the hardware keyboard (ha!) and is very expensive (compared to $230 I paid the brand-new Pre 3). Actually, I’d still like to get it, and perhaps even use as my main phone. My N900 did a much better job of syncing with Evolution using syncEvolution (worked out of the box). N800 and 770 did serve me well in the past as well.
As I am not a big web app user (sorry, got to keep all my data with me; encrypted locally then pushed somewhere is ok, but none of the services does that), I want free and open stack more than anything else. With that, only Pre3 and N9 are the options (at least I hope for N9), since you can reflash them with whatever you want. The reason I want this is because I can potentially make whatever *native* app I want for it.
Now, the fact that I am interested only in phones that are basically abandoned by their parent companies is something I might need to get help on.
The sole reason I got an Android phone instead of an N9 is Google Maps. N9 doesn’t have a first party Maps client, Google killed the ‘mobile web’ version of Maps they used to have which rendered quite nicely on the N9 and N900, and the Maps API (in addition to not being free any more) doesn’t expose transit data, so no third party client has transit routing or is likely to in the near future. So Google’s evilness worked perfectly on me, and I had to suck it up and get an Android phone, sadly. Except for that one thing, I’d have got an N9, for many of the same reasons as you.
It’d be nice if OSM could integrate the transit data cities are putting out these days.
I have an LG Optimus One (P500) and it came with Android 2.3.3 installed. Take a look at LG’s website because they have instructions on how to upgrade it. It will definitely have no official ICS for it, but there is already a Cyanogen beta available.
My phone is made in Brazil (where I live) and it’s half the price of a Nexus S or a N9. Smart phones here are very expensive in general.
The N9 wasn’t released in the UK. Are you concerned that you’ll have trouble getting it fixed if, say, the USB port drops off (which happened twice to my N900, and was hard enough to get sorted out to my satisfaction even then), or do you think that by the time this happens you’ll be ready to upgrade anyway?
When I upgraded a few months ago the N9 was several hundred quid more expensive that the Galaxy Nexus, which I just couldn’t justify. I’ve never had an Android phone before, and I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t quite as perfect as everyone seemed to be making out. Android’s good, but it’s not that good. I still haven’t got the hang of the UI, multitasking is more like old-fashioned task switching, and I don’t know how to start sorting the wheat from the chaff on the app Market. On the whole I’m happy with it, but I think it shows there’s still plenty of room for phones to develop.
As long as you don’t stray too far from good signal areas, I think you’ll get by just fine with your webapps.
The N9 wasn’t released in the UK. Are you concerned that you’ll have trouble getting it fixed if, say, the USB port drops off (which happened twice to my N900, and was hard enough to get sorted out to my satisfaction even then), or do you think that by the time this happens you’ll be ready to upgrade anyway?
When I upgraded a few months ago the N9 was several hundred quid more expensive that the Galaxy Nexus, which I just couldn’t justify. I’ve never had an Android phone before, and I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t quite as perfect as everyone seemed to be making out. Android’s good, but it’s not that good. I still haven’t got the hang of the UI, multitasking is more like old-fashioned task switching, and I don’t know how to start sorting the wheat from the chaff on the app Market. On the whole I’m happy with it, but I think it shows there’s still plenty of room for phones to develop.
As long as you don’t stray too far from good signal areas, I think you’ll get by just fine with your webapps.
Peter: one nice thing about the N9, which rather justifies the price differential to me, is that it (or at least quite a lot of them) were made in Finland, so you can feel quite a lot better about the working conditions question. Of course quite a few of the components probably come from China, but it’s still better than the alternatives.
Real underdogs who also don’t like hardware keyboards get the N9 for their phone and also get an HP TouchPad for their tablet device. What a pair of “beautiful losers”!
Also, you can get an open kernel for your N9 that lets you do anything you want to it…
also, http://www.domusweb.it/en/design/portable-cathedrals/ which is a *fabulous* article about the N9.
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