When Stephen Elop, Nokia’s new CEO, got on stage in February at Nokia’s annual Capital Markets Day event and announced to the world that the handset giant would dump Symbian, throw MeeGo under the bus, and switch exclusively to Windows Phone, he upset many loyal fans, not to mention sent the stock into a death spiral. He also said that before putting MeeGo on the chop block there would be one last device powered by the open source Linux based operating system hitting the market later this year. We’ve seen images of said device, which many are calling the N9, as far back as August 2010, and last month we even saw a teaser video promoting said mysterious smartphone. The question on everyone’s mind now is when is this damn thing going to come out?
In less than a week Nokia is going to host an event in Singapore called “Nokia Connection”. Australian news publication iTWire received an invitation to the event and it said that Nokia will be introducing a “new market disrupting device”. There’s a high probability that it’s going to be the N9 because when it was approved by the FCC last month, a request to keep all images of the N9 confidential was also made, with said confidentially agreement expiring on June 24th. Anyway, we hate to burt your bubble, but Eldar Murtazin, the infamous Editor in Chief of Russian website Mobile Review, recently posted a tweet saying Nokia will only produce 92,000 units of the N9, making it a ridiculously niche device, and one many Nokia collectors will be eager to fight over.
What scares us the most is the possibility of the N9 turning out to be a fantastic product. We wish Nokia all the best, but if the N9 is absolutly mind blowing, then many will question why MeeGo was abandoned.