Last year was a bumpy ride for Nokia fans. In February the company’s CEO, Stephen Elop, told the world that Symbian was going to be taken behind the barn and shot in the back of the head. The future, according to him, was going to be Windows Phone. Nine months later, in November, the Lumia 800 hit the UK. Before that happened though there was a magical device, a unicorn if you will, that became available in limited quantities in September. That device was the Nokia N9. Since Elop wanted to make sure people paid attention to the Lumia not the N9, he decided that the N9 should be launched in countries that aren’t considered “major markets”. Places like Finland, which has a population of barely over 5 million people. But what about the UK? No. Germany? No. The United States? Hell no. It’s estimated that despite being somewhat of a pain in the ass to buy, between 1.5 and 2.0 million N9 units were sold. To put that number into some perspective, Nokia sold 2 million Lumia phones in Q1 2011, despite spending an insane amount of money on marketing the damn things.
Sad story out of the way, today we want to talk about some good news. Owners of the N9 should be delighted to know that PR 1.3 is now out. What is it? It’s a software update. What does it do? It fixes an incredible number of bugs, improves copy and paste, makes video playback smoother, and other such small tweaks. It’s nice to know that at least some people inside Nokia still care about the N9, though we hope you don’t get confused into thinking that MeeGo has a future. It doesn’t. Nokia stopped working on it. Many of the people who were on the MeeGo team, including friends of this writer, have left Nokia altogether, so there’s zero chance of the MeeGo team being put back together should Windows Phone fail.