Antinormal

The N9 is a beautiful, sexy device

I picked up a black 64GB N9 yesterday and it's pretty awesome! That is all.

Well, there are quite a number of reviews for the device all over the Internet so I'll just run through this. I played with the device much earlier but I was too lazy to write about it. The swipe UI is rather brilliant. It just feels natural once you figure it out. If anything, the N9 is an example of how devices are meant to be built. The hardware also feels very solid and well built. Did I mention it's sexy? The screen is gorgeous. Video playback is amazing. The UI is fast and responsive.

I have a few qualms with the device though. The WiFi radio seems to be a bit flaky. It doesn't pick up as much signal strength as my other devices in the same room. Contacts don't automatically get merged, which is bad considering certain details were pretty much the same (first name, mobile number and email for instance). I configured the device to sync with my contacts using Ovi, and then I imported contacts from my E7. Since the E7 was also synchronised with Ovi, this ended up creating duplicates. Having to manually merge 100 contacts is no fun at all. I also can't set the number of emails to be stored on the device from my Gmail account. This is weird considering I can do so for other mail accounts. I'd also like to be able to add feeds from other sources to the Notifications/Feed home screen. There are software updates coming though, so I hope these issues will get addressed.

Overall, the good outweighs the bad and I'm very pleased. I'll be porting SimpleIRC to the platform and I'm also working on a few app ideas. Sure, it's a DOA product (Why, Nokia? Why?!), but that doesn't mean I can't have fun with it.