As many had predicted, Nokia has finally unveiled to the world its latest handset the N9 at a Nokia Connection event in Singapore.
It’s the company’s first stab at a handset that is running on MeeGo operating software, which is based on Linux technology – but surely is only a stop-gap before we see Nokia phones on Windows Mobile later this year.
From what we've seen, it's defiantly the funkiest Nokia we've seen, with a cool array of colours shown off at the launch.
Nokia finally look like they have been listening and have done away with all buttons and have introduced a new design where the home key is replaced by a simple gesture: a swipe. Whenever you want to go to the homescreen you merely swipe from the edge of the display take you home.
The homescreen it divided into three views and are designed to give fast access to the most important things people can do with a phone: using apps, keep on top of social notifications and switching between activities.
Made from a single piece of Polycarbonate the case flows into a rather lovely piece of curved glass. Flanked by a laminated deep black display the interface appears to float on the surface of the handset.
Nokia have been some way behind when it comes to handset design, but when it comes to cameras it is the market leader. It's packing a 8 mega-pixel Carl Ziess autofucs sensor, wide-angle lense, HD-quality video capture and large lens appeture meaning that it's actually works in low light levels, something an iPhone cannot do.
The N9 features free-turn-by-turn drive and walk satellite navigation, with voice guidance too.
The AMOLED 3.9 inch screen is perfect for watching videos and is a 16:9 widescreen resolution, so no more annoying black borders. And it's the first smart phone to come with Dolby Digital Plus decoding and Dolby Headphone post-processing technology which aims to give you surround sound experience with any set of headphones. We’ll believe that when we hear it.
The N9 comes with NFC technology, which means you can easily share images and videos between devices by touching them together.
The N9 will come in two flavours; a 16GB offering and a eye-watering 64 GB version - the phone will come in three colours Black, Cyan and Maganta. The phone is scheduled to be in stores later this year. No price is given but will be announced closer to the release date.
Interestingly though, Nokia makes almost no mention of MeeGo in the press information promoting the Nokia N9, which suggests that while Stephen Elop has trumpeted the phone saying it's "market disrupting", its OS is destined to take a backseat once Windows Phone 7 is on the scene.
Take a look at the Nokia N9 in the video below and hit the comments to tell us whether you think MeeGo makes the grade. It certainly looks very slick in the clip but we'll reserve judgement until we can get our hands on the finished article.