At the Nokia Connection event in Singapore Nokia unveiled their first MeeGo based smartphone the N9.
Interestingly the device will feature no front-facing hardware buttons making it the world's first button-lesssmartphone. Users will just need to double tap the display to activate the phone instead of pressing a hardware button.
The N9 will boast of some other formidable features such as an Unibody design, a 3.9-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 854x480, a 8-megapixel autofocus camera featuring a Carl Zeiss lens with 720p HD recording capabilities, NFC (Near field Communication), Dolby surround sound and 1 GB of RAM.
The device will be come in two variants, one a 16 GB and a whopping 64 GB one. The N9 will be available in three colors black, cyan and magenta.
The use of the MeeGo operating system will be a departure from Nokia's aging Symbian platform. It will feature a carousel-like view for the home screen with the space divided into calls, applications and social media. Users will be able to now swipe from edge-to-edge of the display to switch between applications making the user interface intuitive in-comparison to Symbian, which required users to go through various steps. MeeGo will feature a powerful web browser based on the webkit engine.
Previously, MeeGo was supposed to be Nokia's next generation platform but in February Nokia entered into a landmark partnership with Microsoft which resulted in Nokia adopting Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform in process rendering Symbian obsolete and leaving MeeGo's future in doubt.