The Nokia N9 ($700 street) has stepped through a door from an alternate reality with a lesson for us. Almost impossible to buy in the U.S., the N9 is rumored to use the same body, and many of the features of Nokia's upcoming flagship Windows Phone, known as "Sea Ray." It's also just a unique curiosity, the only phone we may ever see based on Nokia and Intel's abandoned MeeGo OS. So this is a different kind of review. Of course you won't buy this phone. But let's see what it can teach us.

Physical Design and Call Quality
The Nokia N9 is utterly gorgeous. It stands out. Nokia is using a unique twist on the traditional slab-phone design, and over the past few days I've had several people ask me what phone I'm carrying.

The phone's 854-by-480, 3.9-inch Gorilla Glass AMOLED screen is surrounded on all sides by a wraparound colored plastic case. It could be black, but it's much more striking in red or blue, because it brings the color around the front and sides of the phone in an unexpected way. It's safe to say this doesn't look like an Apple iPhone 4S ($199, 4.5 stars), or like Windows Phones such as the Samsung Focus ($99, 4 stars).

The screen is traditional AMOLED, but Nokia says it has "no air gap" and a polarizing filter, which delivers some of the brightness and outdoor-visibility rewards found on Samsung's Super AMOLED screens. The screen is very, very sharp, with unusually pure blacks and whites. The phone feels smooth and strange in the hand, like a device made of 1920s-style Bakelite plastic.

A pair of doors on top of the phone hide the SIM card slot and MicroUSB connector; there's no way to remove the battery, and no memory card slot. (Windows Phone doesn't like memory cards much, anyway.) The one false design note is the power button on the right side of the phone. Mine was loose and wiggly.

Reception on T-Mobile's network was strong, and this is one of relatively few phones that works equally well on T-Mobile's and AT&T's 3G networks. It's just 3G, though, topping out at HSPA 14.4—no 4G here. The phone also connects to Wi-Fi networks.

Voice calling could use a bit more background noise cancellation. Sound through the earpiece had generally good timbre, but too much background noise made it through the mic. The speakerphone is a touch quiet, and transmissions through the speakerphone sounded distant.

I wasn't happy with battery life, at a mere 4 hours, 47 minutes of talk time. That's not good enough for a modern 3G phone. Hopefully that speaks to MeeGo's power management rather than to any deficiency in the 1450 mAh battery.

MeeGo (Away Now)
The N9 could have been the first of many MeeGo phones, but Nokia pulled the plug on the project in February when it decided to ally with Microsoft to make Windows Phones.

I've heard wags call the Linux-based MeeGo "the last, best hope of the open-source crowd." The sobriquet comes from Nokia's openness to people hacking devices based on its previous Maemo OS, such as the Nokia N900 phone/tablet. That hackability didn't propel Maemo devices past cult status, though, and it doesn't seem to have saved MeeGo either.

MeeGo's home screen sticks with the grid-of-icons  layout that we've seen since early feature phones, but it has several twists. The icons themselves are halfway between circles and squares, and they're gorgeously designed. As you add new icons, they just get piled on the bottom; you don't have multiple pages here.

That's because swiping left, right, up, and down has special meanings in MeeGo. Swiping right from the home screen brings you to a little gallery of minimized windows of all the apps you're running. This is true multitasking. Swipe right again (or left from the home screen) and you get a page of combined Facebook/Twitter updates and email alerts. When you're in an app, swiping up will minimize it; swiping down will close it.

The 1GHz TI OMAP, single-core processor had some trouble handling MeeGo's apps from time to time. I saw some jerkiness in animations, and the phone froze up occasionally. The rest of the time, the UI was extremely smooth and quick, so I suspect the freeze-ups were because of background processes taking up time rather than because of an underpowered CPU.

The phone has all the usual PIM apps, a Webkit-based Web browser (without Flash), and Nokia's free, very good-looking Ovi Maps app. It comes with Twitter and Facebook built-in (including merging Twitter, Facebook, and phone contacts, and showing your friends' most recent status updates on their contact cards). Exchange, Google, and POP/IMAP mail are supported, along with Exchange and CalDAV for calendar.

The virtual keyboard is a pleasure to type on, with both audio and physical feedback. The browser could be faster; it didn't score as well on the BrowserMark benchmark as competing top-of-the-line Android phones, iOS phones, or even the latest BlackBerrys.

To get apps, you go to Nokia's Ovi Store, which has only a handful of selections compared to other platforms and isn't likely to collect many more. There are a few high-end games, like Galaxy on Fire 2 and Need for Speed Shift; Need for Speed wasn't quite as smooth as games on phones with higher-end hardware, like the iPhone 4S.

The phone also has NFC, but here in the United States, there just isn't much to use NFC for. (Ovi Store recommends checking in on FourSquare, but that would require the venues to have NFC tags at them.)

Multimedia
There's 16GB of on-board storage, and no removable memory. The N9 packs a decent 8-megapixel camera with good low-light performance. It isn't as sharp as the Apple iPhone 4S, and photos occasionally had a slight blue or red cast to them. The f/2.2 lens promised great photos in low light, and I saw minimal low-light shutter speed blur—but it was there. The camera records videos in 720P high-def; I got 21 frames per second indoors and a slightly grainy 30 frames per second outdoors. The camera froze once and crashed once in my tests.

The music player is gorgeous, presenting tiles of album art along with clear, alphabetized lists of your music. The single speaker on the bottom of the phone is a bit tinny, but loud. You can flip over to a list of recommendations of similar songs to the one you're playing from Nokia's Ovi Music, which doesn't sell songs to Americans, but can offer up about a dozen genre radio stations. Music sounded fine over wired or Bluetooth headphones.

Video playback performance was deeply disappointing. The N9 couldn't handle any of our high-definition videos, and even dropped some frames when presented with VGA, H.264 video files. The phone handles a range of formats including WMV, XVID, and MPEG4, but you'll have to be parsimonious with your data rates.

Conclusions
MeeGo is a no go. Let's look at the N9 entirely as a physical object and a harbinger of Windows Phones to come. Nokia has built standout hardware here, at least from a visual perspective. The wraparound case and pure black screen will jump out of a lineup of repetitive, similar, dull black and gray designs. This harkens back to Nokia's history of cutting-edge, weird-looking phones, of course, and I hope Nokia keeps veering away from the mainstream.

The phone's performance is average, but acceptable. I can see why MeeGo wasn't deemed ready for prime time, as the N9's user interface gets a bit jerky, its browser needs some polishing, and video playback, especially, is below the level I'd expect from a cutting-edge device nowadays—especially one that costs $700, unlocked.

I'm sure there are some open-source zealots who are salivating over the thought of bending the N9 to their will. The rest of us should shy away from a phone whose platform has pretty much been marooned. But if this is what Nokia's designers are working on for the first generation of Windows Phones, Sea Ray and its ilk will really stand out in a crowd.

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