I agree with your point about politics. But marketwise, the N9 sold very well despite the project received no support, and also got glowing reviews [1]. The N900 still enjoys cult status. Posts about this device pop up in HN every now and then.

Maemo/MeeGo could have >10% marketshare in some EU countries, just like desktop Linux does right now. The N9 was a very elegant device, ready for the masses, and good enough to become a third mobile platform.

The N9 was incredibly elegant and easy to use. The hardware was well crafted, and the card-based UI was outstanding. All applications were well integrated. For example, any messaging application would add its protocol to your contact list, instead of having everything fragmented in apps. Offline maps were second to none. It took a decade for iOS and Android to catch up.

It shipped with native support for a variety of VoIP protocols, including Google Talk (Jingle) and Skype. The OLED screen was stunning on the dark mode UI. Mozilla provided a great mobile Firefox port, and there was a native terminal just in case you wanted to ssh to machines or do something from your phone. Tethering or even using Linux running on your phone from a bigger screen worked really well, in 2011.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review

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FirmwareBurner a day ago | parent [-]

>The N9 was incredibly elegant and easy to use.

Who cares, is nobody bought it? You need sales to make money because you need money to pay wages and shareholders. Otherwise you're preaching to the choir. The graveyard of history if full of great products and great ideas that didn't catch on for various reasons related to sales, timing, marketing and execution.

It doesn't matter if the N9 was good or not in the minds of the tech savvy HN crowd, what matters is that the iPhone beat them on the free market.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" and Steve Jobs understood this better than anyone.

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nextos a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Who cares, is nobody bought it?

The N9 was sold out in Scandinavia, and it was outselling Lumia (Windows) in Q4 '11. That's fairly good for something that had no marketing and it had already been labeled as a dead platform. Around 2 million N9 devices were sold. That's on the same order of magnitude as any Google Pixel generation.

What could have happened if the device had been phased out is something we can only hypothesize about, but I don't think it's fair to claim it was a fringe device nobody cared about.

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FirmwareBurner a day ago | parent [-]

>The N9 was sold out in Scandinavia

If only Scandinavia was as relevant as the US, UK, Asia and rest of the EU for a product to stay in development and in production to remain internationally relevant and competitive to the iPhone.

>Around 2 million N9 devices were sold.

My LLM research says 1-1,5 Million MeeGo powered Nokia N9 devices were sold by 2011, versus 93 Million iPhones and 237 Million Android devices out of which Samsung had 94 million, similar to Apple at the time. The N9's 1,5 Million wasn't even close, it was orders of magnitude less than Apple or Samsung.

So the writing was on the wall by then. How can you even think that they had a chance to be competitive after the numbers of 2011? Based on those numbers they were right to pull the plug back then at the time, the finances spoke for themselves, there was no way for Nokia to turn the ship around in their favor. The line was just going down and even more down.

	▲	necovek a day ago \| parent [-]
		This is the phone that came out and faced an announcement that development is stopping on the platform a few months before release — that's actually amazing sales considering the circumstances! HP Pre 3 was a similar situation where it was pulled after it was shipped to retailers and operators, but before it went officially on sale — they still sold well even with unsupported system. There were many rugpulls like these, and while they technically make these products flops, they were also not given a fair chance either.

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necovek a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

N9 development was stopped by the management despite the success in the market: all Nokia phones started moving to Windows as the "strategic" platform due to a new CEO who joined from Microsoft.

Yes, previous management messed up before that point too (they did not ship N700 with GSM chip and marketed it as "internet tablet" so as not to jeopardize their Symbian phone sales, only adding it to N800 and beyond, and then Apple turned their iPod Touch into iPhone and stole their lunch), but they finally figured out a great phone, and then... pivoted.

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StopDisinfo910 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Who cares, is nobody bought it?

Your point was that Nokia had nothing that could compete with the iPhone. You have now been shown this to be patently untrue and that Nokia was killed by an incompetent board bringing in a MS transfuge.

Stop trying to move the goal post. You are just wrong. That’s ok, you will survive. Everybody who lived through it could have told you by the way. The first iPhone was a pretty poor device and it wasn’t before the 3 that things started to improve. There was plenty of space to compete.