Nokia Debuts Meego With All New N9; Windows Phone Next?

Nokia introduced the all new N9 smartphone this week and set the date for its annual Nokia World conference.

The N9 is Nokia's first Meego operating system phone and the company's latest efforts in smartphones. The phone has 3.9-inch AMOLED screen with a scratch resistant curved glass featuring a polycarbonate body that acts as the antenna. The phone comes with three home views, with accessible via swiping. The buttons of past Nokia phones are gone, the phone is completely touch based.

We reinvented the home key with a simple gesture: a swipe from the edge of the screen. The experience sets a new bar for how natural technology can feel, Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's head of Design, said in a statement.

And this is just the beginning. The details that make the Nokia N9 unique - the industrial design, the all-screen user experience, and the expressive Qt framework for developers - will evolve in future Nokia products.

Along with introducing the N9 phone, Nokia also set the date for its Nokia World conference, October 26-27 in London. Rumors have already begun to swirl that on this day Nokia will introduce its first Windows Phone. If the phone was introduced then, it would fall in line for the introduction of the first Windows Mango phone, which is the next generation of the operating system.

Analysts were not too impressed with the N9, which has been par for the course for Nokia. Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight, said the N9 comes too close to the expected release of the first Nokia Windows Phone to have any impact.

The strength of rival ecosystems leaves little room for MeeGo powered devices. It's difficult to see the N9 being anything more than a niche device ... the N9 will be a tough sell, Wood said.

Wood said it would likely be the one and only Meego device. Another analyst, RBS securities analyst, Didier Scemama expressed similar sentiments in a research note.

It seems pointless to launch a phone like the N9 on a platform that has been cut by management, Scemama said.

Nokia has struggled in smartphones to say the least. Not only is it no longer the biggest smartphone operating system provider in the U.S. having been surpassed by Google's Android, its losing share internationally as well according to recent Gartner numbers. It also has lost share from being the largest provider of physical devices in the world. The company's U.S. stock, which actually rose 3.59 percent today, is still at $6.06 per share. This is the lowest its been since early 1998.

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