With the N9, Nokia has “invented” a new gesture: the swipe. The phone has no home button (although you do get volume switches and the like on the side), so returning to the home screen is done by swiping in from any side of the screen. This could be annoying or awesome, depending on implementation. The N9’s familiar icon-driven interface is divided into three sections. Events shows you the feeds from your friends’ social networks, along with notifications. A multitasking view shows an Exposé-style tiled view of all open apps, and the applications view shows all your apps as icons.
Impressive, but the outside is even better. Gone is the busy, miniature-computer styling of previous Nokia smartphones. This thing is a sleek marriage of a giant 3.9-inch 854 x 480 AMOLED Gorilla Glass screen curving gently out from a polycarbonate unibody body. It’s like a giant iPod Nano, in a very good way.
If Nokia can knock out phones this good with Microsoft’s lovely Windows Phone 7, then things might not be as bleak as they seemed. Available soon, price to be announced.
See more at Wired and the official site
