One day in the not too distant future we’ll look back at 2011 and the Nokia N9 and wonder what would have happened if the world’s largest mobile phone maker decided to bet their future on MeeGo and not Windows Phone. The N9 is a smartphone that many technology journalists have had a chance to play with, and they all come back asking the same thing: “Why is this being killed?” It’s all internal politics of course, no matter what the CEO of Nokia says we’ll always be convinced that his former role at Microsoft played a large role in the demise of Nokia’s chance at actually clawing their way back to smartphone supremacy. The worst thing about the N9 is that Nokia is artificially limiting the number of territories where the device will be offered. It’s coming to Finland, of course, Sweden, a handful of Middle Eastern countries, and now we can also add Mexico to that list.
Earlier this year we heard a rumor that Nokia would make only 100,000 units of the Nokia N9, and with the handful of relatively small countries it’s launching in, we wouldn’t be surprised if said rumor turned out to be true. Die hards will probably be importing the N9, take a knife to their SIM card so it can fit in the microSIM tray, and use what will forever be known as the last “Pure Nokia” phone to ever be released. They’ll always be the feature phones of course, and we’ve got no doubt in our minds that Series 40 will become more impressive as time goes on, but it just isn’t going to be same. Nokia would never in their right mind make a $600 feature phone, unless that is they take one of their $200 devices and plate it in gold, like they so often do for reasons we’ll never quite understand.