UPDATE: Here is a link to the Nokia N9 Walk Through and keynote excerpts.
Stephen Elop is going to take the stage at CommunicAsia 2011 tomorrow at Nokia Connection and announce a new Maemo 6 device. Thanks to some enthusiastic Maemo forum members who went digging around Nokia Vietnam’s website they found mention of a new handset the Nokia N9 “Lannku”. This is meant to be the only devices running this operating system this year.
According to Tinhte – translated here – the N9 Lannku will be a slim, touch device which is different then the leaked photo’s of an aluminum slider with a QWERTY keyboard. Pricing in Vietnam is expected to be under the equivalent of $624 unlocked and SIM-free when it arrives this fall.
We’ve been waiting for this 4″ handset to surface since early 2010. I was personally hopeful that this might have been the MeeGo smartphone which Nokia has promised for 2011. But it is likely to be shown closer to the end of the year since they still have a lot of work to do to make the operating system user ready.
What we are seeing here are pieces of Nokia’s former game plan which have since been abandoned for Windows Phone. MeeGo, a joint venture with Intel, has been pushed aggressively onto the sidelines into Nokia labs, which is for small scale research projects. We’ll be seeing a few more of these non Microsoft endeavors sneak out before Nokia becomes just a hardware manufacturer, like Dell, to Microsoft who has suddenly take their place in mobile computing race.
Via SlashGear
