Gadgetory

hello everyone this is Hampton tonight from pocketnow.com and today we're gonna take a look at the software on the Nokia n9 which runs Mikko version 1.2 Harman 10 now this version of me go and MeeGo in general is nothing like Windows Phone iOS or Android but you will see lots of similarities with all of these free platforms so without any further ado let's get to the software tour of the Nokia n9 the Nokia n9 is a pure touch device as Nokia likes to call it and they have managed to build the smartphone without any need for a hardware or capacitive button to operate the phone instead nokia has built it together with the the platform ego so that the single gesture which is most common for most people or for every people the swipe is at the center of operating the phone so basically you will only need to swipe your fingers on the screen to operate it now what you see here is the home screen of MIGO 1.2 Harmattan and as you can see it's a list of icons and it might resemble the application tray of Android or even the icons on iOS now in terms of similarities you will find the first similarity here on the home screen with the icons this is a similarity with iOS and Android but Nakia managed to introduce not one but three home screens which they call panels and this is resembling Windows Phone 7 so we got one panel here swiping to the left will take you to the second panel which is for multitasking and swiping again to the left will take you to your newsfeed where you will see your current date the day your location as well as the weather any notification which you might receive right here regarding new email messages missed calls or text messages and right below this part right here features your newsfeed which aggregates your news feed from Facebook from link them from Twitter from Skype even which is scrollable and of course updates at a certain interval and swiping left once again will take you to panel number one or two because we have one on the right and one on the left but you just can go forever like this tapping at the very top of the screen right here on the date will bring you a shortcut notification like screen where you can quickly let me just zoom in for you to see where you can quickly switch your profile to silent beep you can of course play with the volume controls and the volume for the media playback you will have a notification whether you are connected to the internet or not we are currently in airplane mode but connected via wireless to our router and you can quickly toggle your online availability for the accounts which are set up on the phone in our case we have Facebook and Skype so you can bring them all online all offline or you can toggle them one by one now here's where the swipe comes in wherever you are and whichever application is on your screen swiping from either side will take you to your home screen let's make a swipe from down towards up and here we go swiping once again to the left will take you to your application screen which is your multitasking screen where all applications which are open will have a dedicated card which is very webOS like or Windows Phone 7 like but it's pretty pretty good so you can whatever jump back to the application you are previously in this is a setting which you can enable in inside the settings of the phone by default when you swipe from the top towards the bottom you will get back to your home screen but if you activate the setting swiping from up to down will close the actual application and unload it from memory so instead of just taking us back to the home screen it just closed the application and it disappeared from the multitasking screen let's get back home and let's take a look at the applications which come with the Nokia n9 of course you'll find your typical applications like your phone contacts search Internet Explorer but what's cool with Nokia devices is that the s2 based company always backs navigation and maps so what's really cool about this phone is that it has Nakia maps which were previous known as avi maps but Nakia rebranded them and the maps and the mapping data is really really good and we should say that the GPS part of the phone is also great in finding GPS signal and having a quick fix as you can see it will load our current position in just a couple of seconds tapping on that little icon and we are right here where we are currently situated and since we're talking about the maps let's take a look at the navigation which is called Nokia Drive it takes a little bit of time launching but there we go it's currently looking for a GPS signal but it's the typical macchia GPS navigation application which we are glad that macchia brings also to Windows Phone 7 as it brings it to me go and to Symbian devices too now let's just get back and see what else is here we got of course email application calendar clock the clock has a new LED segment about the minimalistic towards futuristic look to it you can set your alarms as you would with any other platform actually I should tap on the plus and you just drag the minutes and the hour to your desired position and you have your alarm set we have camera application gallery application and let's just take a look for just a small period of time at the gallery application as you can see all your pictures and videos taken with the phone are represented here while opening a certain picture let's just take this actually this is the video is just white back go back to the gallery application back here we go this should do just fine nokia managed to introduce a very neat way of editing your pictures while being on the phone and this is a non-destructive editing which means that whatever changes you do and you make and apply to your pictures will be saved as a new file and the original will be kept so you should go to this menu button right here and edit and here's a list of all of the actions you can take upon this picture you can quickly auto fix everything to rotate the picture and has brightness or contrast crop resize reduce red eyes if you have shot a person and the red-eye secured into flash straightening picture flip it horizontally or vertically and that's just it and whatever changes you make it will save it as a new file so your original capture will be untouched let's just go back to the home screen and see what else we have here now the Facebook application was pre-installed on the Nokia n9 but you can also find applications in the Nokia Store for Foursquare for Twitter and you can also install Skype now what's particularly interesting and annoying about this phone is that despite the fact that it sports a front-facing camera there is no way in actually using the camera so you cannot video call somebody neither through your normal regular phone calling procedure or or your data connection or Wireless and you can't even make a Skype video call so the first and probably one of the few applications which use the front-facing camera on the end line is a mirror application which is rather strange it will start the camera and as you can see we are here filming and that's pretty much it we hope Nakia fixes this with a new software update which is coming soon real quick we have also applications we have a weather application we have your documents application we have YouTube which unfortunately only takes you to the mobile webpage which is by the way html5 but it's not a dedicated YouTube application playback is OK it's smooth but it's just the website and of course we have some games pre-installed like Angry Birds like real golf Need for Speed Shift so on and so forth we have Wi-Fi hotspot functionality and let me tell you that this works very very well you have lots of settings to tweak and the range on the Nokia n9 is surprisingly good so while your iPhone 4 might get out of range when its emitting and it's functioning in Wi-Fi hotspot mode the Nokia n9 still is in range ok let's just get back here and take a look at something else the internet browser and let's just close it all together and fire up a new one first of all most annoying is that it's not supporting multiple tabs instead if you want to open a link in a new tab it will actually open a new browser for you and switching among the two will require you to go to the multitasking screen and switch as you will see right now so let's just go to pocketnow.com the browser is actually really really good it's fast but we have one problem with it it often brings up the checkerboard effect now as you can see we have a huge checkerboard but you might say the page is not yet loaded let's just wait for it to fully load go back to the top and give it a second there we go it's fully loaded and now let's try to swipe you see you got a checkerboard swiping back and still it tries to catch up so you will have to put up with this double-tapping - zoom works just fine it takes just a second to render pinch-to-zoom also works fine else it's very very fluid and switching to landscape is quick and we have a Windows Phone 7 like animation which is good but also the checkerboard will be present and landscape too if you once you scroll faster than the foam itself wants you to let's just close this and get back to the main screen of applications and take a look at the music player now the music player is something I like on the Nokia n9 because it has this great representation of all your albums and going into one particular album will bring you the huge album art which really pops up the deep blacks on the AMOLED screen nothing to mention here let's just close it like this and get back to the homescreen let's take a quick look at the settings but it's built right here and you will see that you have several regions of the screen you have the top region where he can flip the switch on flight mode you have a quick menu to your internet connection whether you are on wireless or on data connection you have your mobile network settings you have general settings for the brightness and as you will notice there is no way in turning off the ambient light sensor so we are currently maxed out with the settings then you have the bottom part of the screen which is your default settings menu with device Bluetooth sounds and vibration wallpaper and so on and so forth you can't really have anything out of the ordinary is just your typical settings which you might expect from a phone lets just swipe back and let's take a look for a second at the multitasking screen this screen shows you the cards of the applications which are currently open and pinching and zooming will change the display from a to buy to representation to a 3x3 representation which is good if you have many applications tapping any one of the screens will take you to the application itself switching between them is really really quick but if you want to close an application you will tap and hold on one and tap the X or if you want to close everything you just step on close all and you will have a clean fresh start while still at the application screen there is an easy way to rearrange the icons you just tap and hold and you drag the icon wherever you want but you cannot drag it to another screen the screens are fixed and there are no widgets so if you are a widget guy you will not like the Nokia n9 let's just say we're done here and that's pretty much it we have the three panels we have the application list and one of the main problems with the Nokia n9 will actually stop with the device it's with the ecosystem itself is that MIGO doesn't have that much applications probably it has the least applications among all the mobile platforms currently so if you go to store and try to find an application like Spotify for instance you will not find it well you will say that I'm wrong because but if I just recently launched the Amigo application but believe me I cannot find it and I will demonstrate it let's just taps but if I and we have a third-party application now this might depend on the actual location of the phone of your account your geographical location for the account itself but going back home and going to categories let's say you want to go to applications you have all your categories let's go into business and well as you can see the scroll bar there are really not that much applications installed so probably or available so probably you will go through them then a couple of days hopefully this will be fixed in the future when probably mEagle will become a little bit more popular even though with nakiye maintaining it that's a very thin chance for it of course it's with any Nokia device it comes also with the early music which will soon be rebranded to Nakia music it's basically your marketplace for music where you can purchase songs albums and so on and so forth if you are into music and purchasing music from your phone this is the place where you will go on your Nokia and nine last but not least let's take a look at the the gaming performance and the gaming experience at the Nokia n9 and let's try to launch Angry Birds and see how it goes there we go so as you can see the scrolling is fluid and so is the pinching and zooming so we really don't have anything bad to say here in terms of framerate performance let's try Need for Speed Shift which is more demanding just zoom in a little bit but those were real real quick take a look at all those smudges on the screen this is one of the best points of the Nokia n9 as you can see it's buttery smooth and it's very very responsive except for my driving skills it's very playable it's enjoyable so nothing bad again to say here just jump back and take the application first and there we go we just close the application altogether so this was a short brief look at the software on the Nokia n9 the same phone well approximately the same phone will come with Windows Phone 7 it will be called Nokia Lumia 800 now is it better than me go of course it's better because it's one of the top three platforms currently available but me go really has some potential and it's really really unfortunate that Nokia abandoned the platform I'm sure that with the proper support both from manufacturers and developers it will become a pretty neat little platform but at the moment it's not something you might want to switch to if you are an Android iOS or Windows Phone user if you've liked this video please give us a thumbs up this was anton denied from pocketnow.com taking a look at the software on the Nokia n9 you