Hi guys,

I was recently at a talk by Brian Kralyevich, who was the product lead for the N9. He told some stories about the development of the N9 and I thought you guys might be interested.

He loves the N9 but was obviously very jaded from his experience at Nokia. He complained that the Finnish were very slow and their product cycles took way too long, apparently the N9 took 3 years. Also, according to Kralyevich, the higher ups were all adamant that the N9 have a hardware keyboard (what we now see as the N950), and he kept telling them no, that was the wrong choice, but they wouldn't listen to him. So he flew to Espoo (he was based in London, like Peter Skillman, etc), and had a one on one meeting with Elop and convinced him to ditch the hardware keyboard, and that's how we got the N9 we know today.