is nokia n9 worth buying?

The Nokia N9 is a smartphone made by Nokia based on the MeeGo "Harmattan" mobile operating system, the first MeeGo smartphone from Nokia, with no buttons on the front and a unibody design with a curved touchscreen. Its polycarbonate casing comes in three colors, cyan, black and magenta. The phone looks quite good and the underlying operating system 'MeeGo' looks pretty from every angles. Here's some of the key aspects of the phone,

It includes three processor units: a 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU which runs the operating system and applications, an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 530 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 and capable of processing up to 14 million polygons per second; and a 430 MHz TI TMS320C64x, a digital signal processor, which does image processing for the camera, audio processing for telephony and data transmission. The system also has 1 GB of low power single channel RAM. These hardware specifications signifies a strong performance and good battery life.

The Nokia N9 has a 3.9-inch (99 mm) capacitive touchscreen (up to 6 simultaneous points) with a resolution of 854 × 480 pixel (FWVGA, 251 ppi). According to Nokia it is capable of displaying up to 16.7 million colors. The AMOLED screen is covered by a scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla glass. The gap between the glass and the display has been reduced and the screen is coated with an anti-glare polarizer to ease the usability in daylight. There is a proximity sensor which deactivates the display and touchscreen when the device is brought near the face during a call. It has also an ambient light sensor that adjusts the display brightness.

The back camera has an autofocus feature, dual LED flash, is optimized for 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio and has a 4× digital zoom for both video and camera. The sensor size of the back camera is 8.7 megapixel (3552 x 2448 px); the effective resolution for the 16:9 aspect ratio is 3552 x 2000 px (7.1 megapixel) and 3248 x 2448 px (8 megapixel) for 4:3 aspect ratio. Typically, a 16:9 picture format on a digital camera is achieved by cropping the top and bottom of a 4:3 image, since the sensor is 4:3. The Nokia N9 genuinely provide more in the width of the picture by choosing the 16:9 aspect ratio option (using the full 3552 px of the sensor) and more in the height of the picture by choosing the 4:3 aspect ratio option (using the full 2448 px of the sensor). The lens, marketed as "Carl Zeiss", has quite unusual specifications for a mobile phone: 28mm wide angle focal length, fast (for this class) f/2.2 aperture and 10 cm to infinity the focus range. It is capable of video recording at up to 720p at 30 fps with stereo sound. Under different testing conditions, N9's camera performed reasonably well.

So the bottomline line is if you are a Nokia fanboy or looking for a mobile that runs on MeeGo linux, N9 will do more than just pleasing you. It's a great piece of hardware that also looks pleasantly well. But if you're not just set on MeeGo as your choice of OS, then there are other viable options as Android/iPhone. Limited release of Nokia N9 around the world is also a factor to be reckoned with.