The Nokia N9
The Nokia N9 is a Linux smartphone released in September 2011, running MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan on a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 with a 3.9in 854×480 capacitive AMOLED and no hardware keyboard or home button, and it is the last device of the Maemo lineage Nokia ever shipped.
It is the only retail phone to run Harmattan, and no MeeGo successor followed it. Where it sits against the tablets and the N900 is set out at The devices, in order.
What the Nokia N9 is
The Nokia N9 is a Debian-based Linux phone wearing a MeeGo badge. Harmattan was developed inside Nokia as the successor to Maemo 5 and was renamed after Nokia and Intel merged Maemo and Intel’s Moblin into MeeGo under the Linux Foundation in February 2010. The shipping system is a Maemo body with the MeeGo 1.2 application programming interface layered on it, which is why Nokia’s own naming, MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, reads as a compromise. It is.
What distinguishes the N9 from its four siblings is the removal of things. It has no hardware keyboard, no resistive layer, no stylus, no memory card slot, no removable battery and no home button, where every earlier device in the line had at least four of those six. Navigation happens entirely through Swipe, a gesture interface with three home views: events, applications and open applications.
The Nokia N9: release date and the software it shipped with
The release date of the Nokia N9 was September 2011, and the software it shipped with was MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Nokia announced the phone on 21 June 2011 at its Nokia Connection event in Singapore and shipped it in the first markets that September, roughly four months after announcing in February 2011 that Windows Phone would be its primary smartphone platform. The N9 therefore launched as a product whose platform had already been retired by its own maker.
Firmware updates continued for a period after launch, adding features such as a larger set of supported languages and interface refinements, and then stopped. The store that served Harmattan applications has since closed. This reference hosts no firmware and no application packages of any kind.
The Nokia N9: case, screen and input
The case of the Nokia N9 is a single piece of polycarbonate coloured all the way through, about 116 x 61 x 12 mm and 135 g, with the glass curved down into the shell at the edges. Colour runs through the material rather than sitting on it as paint, so scratches do not show a different colour underneath. It is the design Nokia carried straight into the Lumia 800, which used the same body shape with Windows Phone inside.
Input is touch only. The 3.9in 854×480 AMOLED is capacitive and covered in toughened glass, and there is no keyboard, no stylus and no front button: a double tap wakes the phone and a swipe from any edge closes what is open. Anyone moving from the tablets or from a slider found this the largest single change in the whole line.
The Nokia N9: full specifications
The full specifications of the Nokia N9 are set out below. Figures Nokia never published are left out rather than guessed.
| Item | Nokia N9 |
|---|---|
| Announced | 21 June 2011, at Nokia Connection in Singapore |
| Released | September 2011 |
| Operating system | MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan |
| Processor | TI OMAP 3630, ARM Cortex-A8 at 1 GHz |
| Graphics | PowerVR SGX530 |
| Memory | 1 GB RAM |
| Storage | 16 GB or 64 GB internal, no memory card slot |
| Display | 3.9in, 854×480, capacitive AMOLED with curved glass |
| Input | Touch only, Swipe gesture interface, no keyboard and no home button |
| Camera | 8 MP Carl Zeiss with dual LED flash, 720p video, front camera |
| Cellular | GSM and 3G |
| Other radios | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, A-GPS, NFC |
| Battery | BV-5JW, 1450 mAh, not user replaceable |
| Size and weight | About 116 x 61 x 12 mm, 135 g |
The Nokia N9: battery and battery life
The battery of the Nokia N9 is a BV-5JW rated at 1450 mAh, sealed inside the unibody, and battery life is the one area where the N9 improved on The Nokia N900 rather than trading against it. The AMOLED panel draws power in proportion to how much of the screen is lit, so the black backgrounds Harmattan uses throughout its interface are a power decision as much as a visual one, and the 1 GB of RAM removed the constant swapping that drained the N900.
Because the pack is sealed, the workarounds that N900 owners used do not transfer. There is no spare cell to carry and no extended pack with a larger back cover, since the back is the phone. Replacing a worn BV-5JW means opening the unibody, which is a repair rather than a swap. No published capacity figure exists for any third-party replacement that this reference would repeat.
The Nokia N9: the Linux underneath, and what still runs on it
The Linux underneath the Nokia N9 is a Debian-derived system with Qt as its application framework, and the community continuations that reached this hardware came from the MeeGo side of the family rather than the Maemo side. Harmattan moved the platform from GTK and Hildon to Qt and QML, which is the technical reason applications written for Maemo 5 did not simply carry across.
- Mer continued the MeeGo core as a distribution-neutral base after the MeeGo project itself ended.
- Nemo Mobile, the community user interface built on the Mer core, was ported to the N9 and the N900.
- Sailfish OS, built by Jolla on the Mer core by former Nokia staff, is the commercial continuation and is still shipping.
- Kali Linux, which published an ARM image for the N900, never shipped an N9 build; the sealed bootloader situation on retail N9 units is the practical reason.
Messaging on Harmattan ran through Telepathy, so Skype and instant messaging accounts appeared beside phone numbers in one conversation list. WhatsApp never shipped an official Harmattan client, and third-party clients written by the community filled that gap instead.
The Nokia N9: what replaced it, and where it sits in the line
What replaced the Nokia N9 was nothing, at least from Nokia. The company shipped the Lumia 800 on Windows Phone in the same body a few months later, and the MeeGo product line ended with a single retail device. A sibling exists but was never sold: the Nokia N950, a developer device with a slide-out keyboard, distributed to registered developers only.
Placed in the line, the N9 is the sixth and last device and the point where the software leaves Nokia. The Nokia 770 started the family in November 2005 with 64 MB of RAM and a stylus; the N9 ended it in September 2011 with 1 GB of RAM and no stylus at all, sixteen times the memory and none of the buttons. What carried on afterwards, through Mer, Jolla and Sailfish OS, is traced at Maemo and the Nokia Linux line.
Nokia made no device called the N9000. The phone is the N9, the developer variant is the N950, and the tablets are the N800 and N810. This reference is independent: it is not Nokia, not Jolla and not maemo.org, and it carries no firmware, no ROMs and no prices.