A Skype client – which also supports chat and contacts sync – is preloaded, plus those with their own SIP accounts can register them and access VoIP as another option in the dialer. Those hoping to manage their work and personal tweets from the N9 will be disappointed.Īs with Symbian Nokia devices, the company doesn't assume you'll be satisfied with solely cellular voice calls. Oddly, while you can upload photos directly to Facebook, you can't do the same with Twitter, and you're also limited to just one of each account. The dedicated Facebook and Twitter apps – which each feed their recent updates into the notifications homescreen pane – are basic but serviceable. MeeGo pulls in profile photos from your Facebook friends, and creates monogram 'squircles' for those it can't find. From there you can see just how many emails you have, along with a preview of the latest a swipe in any direction unlocks the phone.Ĭalendar and Contacts work as you'd expect, combining your Google, Exchange, Facebook and other sources into a single location. You can reach the regular lock screen by pressing the physical button on the side, but alternatively a brisk double-tap on the touchscreen takes you there too. When locked, the N9 shows a dim white clock – the low-power benefits of AMOLED allowing it to stay active for this all the time, without draining the battery – and some notification icons, such as when you have new emails. Then there are the less obvious elements, which help add to MeeGo's sense of depth. Apps introduce themselves with a sentence explaining the functionality: suggesting you sync music across from your computer, for instance, or inviting you to create your first note. It took mere minutes to get used to the swipe multitasking, helped by the fact that MeeGo drops you back exactly where you were in the homescreen triptych, even if you were scrolled partway down the app launcher list. It's a button we seldom felt the need to tap, however even with 25+ apps in the list, the N9's 1GHz single-core handled things well, though occasionally we'd see a little sluggishness as apps loaded.Ĭonsidering how touch integration was so uncomfortably bolted onto Symbian back in the S60 v.5 (aka Symbian^1) days, a clumsy afterthought, it's great to see that Nokia's software engineers do actually know what they're doing with touchscreen technology. A 'Close All' option at the bottom takes you back to square one. Tapping any app re-opens it holding down on the thumbnail pulls up red 'X' buttons for each app, allowing you to close it completely. Otherwise, manual task management is done from the multitasking pane, which by default shows four large thumbnails on-screen at a time, but with a pinch-zoom gesture can flip to showing nine, complete with a neat zooming animation. Optionally, swiping down can close the app rather than leave it running in the background. Navigating between apps is all swipe-based: swipe across the screen in any direction to exit the current app and return to the homescreen. Tap the title bar, with its icons for battery, network status, time and activity, and up pops a simple pane showing the current profile – silent, beep or ringing, with the ringing bar extending to show ringer volume – volume and current connections or downloads, including WiFi status and your availability on Facebook chat, Skype and Google Talk, all of which are supported natively. Lists spring and bounce when scrolled to their end, and there's no lag to be encountered in swiping. The whole interface is awash with neat little animations and usability tidbits, all with touch at their heart.

Swiping left and right slides between each pane. The homescreen is a triptych of panes: a vertically scrolling app menu, with icons for all your software, then a task-switcher pane showing thumbnails of recently used apps in the order you last accessed them, and then finally a notifications pane, with weather, a section of email/calendar/etc alerts, and a long feed of recent updates from Facebook and Twitter.

Like iOS, there are no widgets, but MeeGo feels like it has been designed with multitasking and social integration from the outset. There's the troubled birth, but is the N9 a wallowing nugget of misery or a shining beacon of what could've been?Ĭuriously, endearingly, frustratingly, it's broadly the latter. Soon, it will spar off on another path, as part of the recently announced Tizen, yet another platform with open-source aspirations and ambitions to be on your phone, your tablet, your netbook and your notebook. MeeGo, it was announced at the time, would be sent back to the labs, a test-bed for future 'game changer' technologies but with no concrete commercial future. Unfortunately, Nokia's own work on MeeGo proved insufficiently rapid for newly-crowned CEO Stephen Elop, who balked at the company's sluggardly roadmap and decided to throw in with Microsoft on Windows Phone.

Nokia n9 support skype video call