Dan Hill writes an excellent meditation on the N9 in Domus from a design point of view. The main take-away is that it is a brilliant piece of design, with excellent hardware and software, pleasantly distinguished from Apple’s currently hegemonic design aesthetic, but seriously hampered by a weak app ecosystem.
I am incredibly sad that Nokia finally managed to complement its excellent hardware with a good mobile OS and then immediately obsoleted it to throw in its lot with Microsoft. I’m still tempted to buy an N9 though.
Dan Hill on the hardware:
Domus has had the N9 for the last month and thoroughly road-tested it. First things first. It’s a beautifully made device, perhaps the finest mobile phone handset design yet. The body is polycarbonate, a thermoplastic polymer. Or a plastic, in other words. It feels tough yet light.
Paradoxically, although the surface gives an impression of lightness, the body feels heavy. But it is exactly the right weight. It is roughly the same weight as the iPhone—slightly lighter in fact, despite being a tad larger. But the weight is right in the hand. It’s an example of where Nokia understands hardware, demonstrating that weight can lend handheld devices a perception of quality; see also an Olympus PEN or a Bang & Olufsen TV’s remote control.
On the software:
The graphic design in the Meego OS is often quite wonderful. You will never see a more beautiful calculator app, for what it’s worth. Similarly, all the core functionality—calendar, contacts, notifications, calls—are bold, confident and clear, and perhaps the most elegant of any phone OS thus far. There is some strong work here.
Setting the clock has entailed a redesign of clock-based interactions themselves, which Meego just about gets away with. This brave move indicates the verve that pervades much of Meego, and presents a sharp contrast to Apple’s hokey Vegas-slot-machine-style drums for the same function. All the other core phone-related apps, as well as Camera (which is excellent), Gallery, Videos etc., are well executed. Nokia’s new typeface, ‘Pure’ by master craftsman Bruno Maag, is used throughout, and particularly strong at medium and large sizes. At a smaller size, it gives the perception of being slightly brittle, almost a quaint echo of how phones used to display type. The vivid colour scheme—all rich saturated pinks, oranges and cyans, offset by whites, blacks and greys—is in harmony with the phone’s physical design and that starless and bible black display.
Overall, Meego’s design feels marginally stronger than Apple’s inconsistent designs in iOS, which is both a breath of fresh air and some achievement. Steve Jobs believed that above all his firm had “good taste”, and placed great sway in that; entire swathes of iOS exemplify this belief, with rock-solid interaction design supported by responsive performance, strong accessibility, clear metaphors and big bold buttons.
Yet the skeuomorphic nonsense that incomprehensibly pervades apps like Apple’s own Contacts, Calendar, iBooks, GameCenter, Find My Friends et al—all awkward faux-leather, wood and paper stylings—is is of such questionable “taste” it threatens to damage the overall harmony of iOS with its discordant notes. You cannot derive value from the idle suggestion of such textures on screen; they are physical properties and should be experienced as such, or not at all. Yet Apple’s design team will not explore those physical properties, merely sublimating their desire for such qualities into a picture of leather, a picture of wood. It recalls Marcel Duchamp’s critique of ‘retinal art’ i.e. intended only to please the eye.
This has no place in Nokia’s design universe, thankfully. The design work here is intrinsically of its medium and pleases the eye consistently, without resorting to cheap imagery, but it also pleases the hand and the ear rather more than the iPhone.
And on its possible fate:
The Citröen DS was ultimately destined to befall the fate of mummification as a ‘design icon’ rather than a major commercial success. Numerous beautifully-maintained examples are still just about running, maintained by obsessives who spend their Sunday mornings patching up fuel sumps, buffing white leather interiors and browsing eBay for increasingly rare spare parts.
Perhaps as with the DS 19, the N9 will also end up maintained by an army of enthusiasts, a lost classic filed away in some museum of digital artefacts, an open-source movement supporting and extending Meego as a kind of avant-garde alt.OS, augmented by 3D-printed replacement physical parts or modded components, as with Leicas and Polaroids.
Source: http://domusweb.it/en/design/portable-cathedrals/
