Nokia unveils N9: the world’s first all screen phone, powered by Meego

Nokia just unveiled its newest smartphone, the Nokia N9, which it bills as the world’s first pure touch smartphone, powered by Meego.

Introduced by Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s SVP of design, during the Nokia Connection 2011 in Singapore, the N9 aims to cover the most important things people look for in a smartphone: a functional user interface, a unique industrial design, and a robust platform that allows for easy software development.

The N9 is equipped with a pure-glass interface with only touch as a control mechanism, and has revamped the home screen in light of the fact that making calls is no longer one of the most frequent uses of smartphones.

In terms of design, the Nokia N9 is housed in a unibody enclosure made of polycarbonate material and a 3.9 inch curved glass AMOLED display. It is free of physical buttons, which is a long way from the previously leaked qwerty-slider .

The phone also boasts a powerful 8mp camera with Carl Zeiss optics, a Webkit 2 web browser, the lastest Nokia Maps with free voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation and like most recently released smartphones is NFC-enabled.

The Nokia N9 comes in three colours: black, cyan and magenta and with storage capacities of 16GB and 64GB on the two variants to be made available.

It will be released “later this year,” although pricing and availability have yet to be revealed.

You can check out the Nokia N9 for yourself with interactive videos that show how the product works at swipeokiaom.

CES 2011: Hands on with Motorola’s XOOM tablet and the Bionic 4G smartphone

Finally an Android phone from Motorola that doesn’t feel like I’m carting around a dictionary! Motorola’s latest star Android phone is the Bionic 4G. As one reporter put it aptly, “Motorola! You’re back!”

The Droid Bionic is a dual-core, Cortex-A9, NVIDIA Tegra 2 based phone with a 960×540 screen that is just a little bit thicker than the Droid X because of its LTE capabilities. Still it doesn’t feel as bulky and it is in fact lighter than its Droid predecessors because it shed the sliding QWERTY keyboard.

The screen resolution is gorgeous making playing games or watching videos in full screen mode an absolute pleasure. The phone is smooth and fits in my back pocket. The Bionic also has Motorola’s full suite of apps, including Motorola’s enhanced Exchange functionality and social networking widgets.

The smartphone has an HDMI output port and is meant to dock. “It’s like a mini computer,” explained the rep. He then showed me how easy it is to hook it up to a TV monitor.

The phone will be sold through Verizon and pricing will be competitive with other smartphones in its league. Android lovers, line up, your new phone is here.

Next I had the pleasure of playing with the tablet that everyone is talking about this year at CES– the Motorola XOOM. XOOM, which we wrote about yesterday , is the first device to incorporate Android 3.0 Honeycomb, Google’s new operating system developed specifically for tablets. The Motorola XOOM’s 10.1″ widescreen is HD optimized and the clarity is beautiful. The tablet includes a fully functioning HD camcorder and a 5MP camera to view and edit videos and photos immediately. The speed is astonishing. It’s sexy, slick and looks exactly like a black iPad but feels a bit heavier in the palm. The device will launch as a 3G/Wi-Fi-enabled device in Q1 2011 with an upgrade to 4G LTE in Q2. When asked about pricing, the rep said it would be competitive with similar tablets and to “ask Verizon.”

Watch a video of XOOM’s 3D Mapping abilities:

Xiaomi India spins off POCO — but no word on its next product

In 2018, Xiaomi launched its super-successful POCO F1 phone in India. The device was a tremendous hit amongst consumers by providing high-end specs at a sub-$300 price.

After a long period of silence, Xiaomi India announced today it’s spinning off POCO into an independent sub-brand.

Manu Jain, Xiaomi India managing director, said the company felt it was the right time to let POCO operate on its own:

However, the company hasn’t provided any detail as to when it planning to release new products. Earlier this week, a trademark filing containing the name ‘POCO F2’ was leaked. But, we don’t know much about the product yet.

In the past few years, POCO’s product manager, Jai Mani, and other top executives left. And for quite some time, the future of the brand was cloudy. In a 2018 interview , POCO’s global head, Alvin Tse, said the team plans to launch more products under the brand, but that never came to fruition.

Last year, Xiaomi launched the K20 Pro , which played in the same price range as POCO F1. It’s not clear POCO will compete with the K series of phones, or explore a different price point.

We’ve asked the company to provide more details, and we’ll update the story when we hear back.