Getting past the lock screen is annoyingly difficult. As with Samsung’s new Galaxy S2, you must grab and drag a lock screen graphic in order to access the menu. Now, on the Galaxy S2, you can swipe the graphic in any direction for menu access, as long as it makes it off the screen. It’s the same with the N9, though far more difficult: The swiping motions weren’t intuitive, and dragging upward from the bottom of the screen took me three or four tries before getting it right.
Swiping upward on an open MeeGo app moves it to a separate menu of open apps, almost like the deck of cards found in HP’s webOS. It’s a feature I’ve always enjoyed, and it’s nice to see it deployed in other OS environments. But be warned: Too many open apps does not a stable system make. The N9 started getting crashy as we broached four or five running apps.
Unfortunately, MeeGo is a dead OS walking, as it were. Nokia plans to make Microsoft’s Windows Phone software its “principle smartphone strategy” going forward, which makes for a very limited shelf life for the N9.
Which ultimately leads to Nokia’s other major problem: apps, or a lack thereof. iOS and Android app inventories number in the hundreds of thousands, while MeeGo’s weighs in at something less than a rounding error. You’ll find no direct app hooks into Gmail or Google Maps, and there’s no incentive for third-party developers to bring their wares to the MeeGo platform. To be fair, through, the N9 does come with a pre-installed version of Angry Birds.