Back to N9 after years ...
 

Hi,
What may be the experience of using N9 and meego after more than two years dealing with other OS an devices ...

History: when I bought my N9 in Spring 2012 to replace my N900 I realized, that I want a physical keyboard :-( - so I switched to Android ...
A few months later my employer switched from BB to iOS so I was forced to deal with touch-keyboards :-( - well I finally came to the conclusion that switching between physical and touch-keyboards is annoying and so bought a BB Z10 an a Lumia 620 as privat-full-touch-devices - the N9 in the darkest corner of the drawer was out of my mind for a long time ....

Now I'm moving to another flat and when I emptied the drawers of my desk it was there - a nearly-never-used N9 16GB in cyan in like-new-condition :-) - what to do now? Sell it, give it to my nephew (wants his first smartphone now for christmas - but all his friends use android ...), put it in another drawer for the next 20 years and sell it for 500.000,- like an Apple one ;-) ...

Well, what I did was loading the battery, switching it on, just to test if it still works, and ... That was on last Sunday and since then I can't stopping myself from playing with it ;-) - first many updates, then realizing, that many things won't work anymore (exchange accounts, Dropbox, ...) - reading through the forums, learned about OpenRepos, found many hacks and a community still active and helpfull.

After all that time I can't believe Nokia abandoned meego in favour for WP - which reached a usability close to meego (but still behind it) only with the last release 8.1 - and we learned: it was the beginning of the end of nokia to choose WP :-(
So after more than two years meego feels still up-to-date and with several hacks it still serves well as a daily device. Of course the browsing experience is outdated (but development stopped - and the competitors weren't better three years ago) and it's much better with opera, so the device is not the problem ;-)

Conclusion: The N9 is still a great device an meego was a promising piece of software - it's a shame - if the community will stay as active as it is these days, the N9 could keep working for daily business for even a few more years - hey folks keep active ;-) - from the hardware side the N9 would be classified as a middle class smartphone today, what ist still good for a soon 4 year old phone :-) - and: todays smartphones are to big for my needs :-( so the N9 feels perfect in size an weight ...

Ah and compared to my beloved BB Z10 - there are many similarities between the two OS - what would have happened if Nokia had cooperated with BB instead of MS - so today Nokia is dead an BB still struggling - A combination of BB's hub with meegos "feeds page" and plus the multitasking-handling of WebOS (RIP) ... ok that's wild guess now ;-)

So what should I do now? I thing I'll keep it at least for a few mor week - to see what usefull things can be hacked in the OS which I still haven't tested in the last days ;-) - or maybe I should give it away immediately, because I already spent ours in playing with the device and should do something more reasonable with my time ;-) - If anyone want's to save me from wasting my live to a dead OS an want's a nearly new N9 in showroom condition - drop me a message with a bid ;-) - location is in the south of germany

Re: Back to N9 after years ...
 

The N9 is definitive proof that Nokia was was ahead of their time and the competition's with Meego. And Windows Phone proved to be the last nail in their coffin, and that's their own damn fault. It's frustrating knowing what could have been if things had been different, but on the bright side BB and Sailfish are keeping the gesture based OS alive. :D

Re: Back to N9 after years ...
 

keep it as a souvenir! such devices will no longer!

Re: Back to N9 after years ...
 

Quick reply...

Maybe, try out Nemo or Sailfish OS on N9? I am no sure about usability of either, but Sailfish has the advantage of being able to run Android apps on it?

Dual-boot, if possible, since you are already invested in MeeGo-Harmattan on it. :-)

Best wishes.

Re: Back to N9 after years ...
 

The N9 port of Sailfish doesn't include Android support. Only Jolla devices include it as it's commercially licensed software.

Re: Back to N9 after years ...
 

Well I would prefer if Jolla would bring a fully featured and fully working Sailfish OS for the N9 - would pay for that - who else ;-)

As I red in the forums the port doesn't work perfect (camera, calls, ...) so it's not really an option - double boot sucks - and Android is not really a choice - I definitely want to stay away from Google as far a possible ;-)

There are so many N9's still in daily use - can't be that hard for the people who originally made the Meego for the N9 ;-) - If the Jolla would be sized as the N9 - I would give it a try but I really don't want a device bigger than a BB Z10 (and thats already feels a bit to big for my needs)

So I'll keep my N9 - it's far away from perfect but even closer to my needs than any Android phablet or Apple-jail ;-) - and let's see if it could compete with my z10 or Lumia 620 in the next months - since one week it replaces the Lumia - let's see what will happen when it comes to daily needs as railway schedules, news reading, messaging
and navigation - btw. is there a working OSM client - cloudGPS seems to be broken :-(

Re: Back to N9 after years ...
 

Hi. The N9 is still a good device. Good but not great, mainly due to Nokia abandoning it, leaving many bugs not fixed (e.g. the battery-draining smartsearch process). There are however (thanks to the community of course) ways to improve it making it much, much better. It's just a shame that it is not that good out of the box. So if you have the time to play with it, you can probably still use it an be satisfied for a year or two:)