The PR 1.2 firmware update has just been rolled out to the developer only N950 MeeGo Harmattan device, and it comes to us in the form of  beta version number 3.2012.02-6_PR_RM680. This update is a precursor to the N9 update, and will give you a fair idea of what new features to expect on your N9.

Highlights include support for five new languages, face recognition, enhanced copy-paste, software update notifications for applications and games in Nokia Store and folders in the application view. If you own a N950, you can find all the details and download links here.

Here is a slightly more detailed changelog, if you have a time, a complete list of the bugs that have been fixed has also been published.

• New languages
  • Persian
  • Hebrew
  • Kazakh
  • Thai
  • Vietnamese
• Software update notifications for content in Nokia Store
• Face recognition for gallery and face tags for Facebook
• Support for folders in the application view
• Mail for Exchange global address book lookup
• Mail thread support in the Email client
• Extended copy-paste support
• Media sharing with DLNA compatible devices
• Improved browser history view
• Compass support in Maps
• QtWebKit update to version 2.2
• New font taken into use
• Front camera support
• Video editing support in the Gallery application
• MeeGotouch Framework
• Visual hint for differentiating swipe close gesture from normal swipes
• Timestamps shown in notifications
• Notifications sorted by timestamps
• Improvements in Event Feed area
• Music controls in Lock screen
• New feedbacks added to MeeGoTouch theme.
• Kernel updated to be in sync with the upstream kernel version 2.6.32.48

• Connectivity

• Android NDEF Push Protocol disabled
• NFC polling enabled in lock screen
• Separate switch for controlling mobile background connections while roaming

• Camera

• Self Timer support
• Composition grid + on/off control

• Calendar

• Better handling of To-Do lists, recurring events and timezones
• Private flag support for events
• Support for read-only events
• Ability to forward/reply/reply-all for received events

• Clock

• Clock alarm becomes silent by flipping the device face down instead of snoozing
• Updated time picker

• Gallery

• People view added to the grid toolbar
• Improved multiple selection indication in grid view

• Music Player

• Audiobook and podcast support
• Ability to create playlists
• Ability to delete music files from music player library views via object menu
• Possibility to see songs that are on the current play queue

[via: My Nokia Blog]

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The MeeGo Harmattan running Nokia N9 may be the last of its kind, but there seems to be no death of quality apps that are coming out for the device. It already has apps for Facebook, Twitter and a few games like Angry Birds and Need For Speed built in, but there are a few key apps which are missing.

In this post I have complied a list of must have apps for the N9, all of which are free. Most of these apps are available from the Nokia Store and clicking on the name should take you to the download page. Lets get started.

• DropN9: As the name suggests, its a Dropbox client for the Nokia N9. The app lets you download and upload filed in multiples and is a must have if you are a dropbox user.

• Internet Radio: An neat little Internet Radio app for the N9, that features a UI is similar to the default music player with album art being replaced by cover art for the featured radio stations. Discovery is helped along by ‘Hot Picks’, Locations, Language and Genre sections. Detailed post here.

• Phone Torch: No frills app that lets you use the inbuilt LED flash as a torch. Launch the app and it immediately turns on the LED and exiting the app closes it.

• Photo Enhancer: A free app from Nokia that lets you put filters on images and then share them. There are a bunch of options available like sepia, grayscale, high contrast and so on.

• Simple Mirror: There is no way to use the front camera on the N9, unless you are making a video call. But if you would like to use the device as a mirror, does the job well.

• gPodder:  A great podcast client with full integration to the gpodder.net web service and a unique user interface, supporting YouTube and Soundcloud feeds in addition to normal audio and video podcast feeds. gPodder will help you manage and synchronize your podcast subscription and listening status (including resuming, streaming and downloading). Discover new, free content via gpodder.net’s podcast directory.

• File Manager: The N9 comes without an inbuilt file manager and the this free apps fills in perfectly. Its light weight and does everything you would expect from an app of this nature.

• Battery Usage: This app mimics the battery usage graph that you may have seen on Android devices. In addition to telling you which app eats how much battery, it can also tell you how much of that battery was consumed in the background and how much was drained while the app was actually in use. This will help you decide if you can leave the app running or whether you should exit everytime you are done with it.

• City Scene: The app lets you explore a bunch of cities in the US and Europe in 3D, much like Google Street view, but with a few extra features.

Shortcuts: The N9 has a set of 4 quick access shortcuts which you can bring up by swiping up for a short distance and holding it there. The problem is that you cannot change these without an app. Enter Shortcuts which lets you change the four of these by simply dragging an app of your choice to the current location of the shortcut.

Ionic: An ebook reader for the N9 that supports the EPUB format. It supports navigation by swipe or the volume keys, display themes, brightness control, orientation locking at many more. Create bookmarks with notes, jump to bookmarks or chapters. The Library feature allows ordering books by author or title, inspecting book details, and importing books downloaded from the web.

Sports Tracker: A long favourite of Nokia users, Sports Tracker lets you track and analyze your workouts, share workout data and photos with your friends. You can also track everything online on the developer’s website.

• ScreenshotMee: It lets you take screenshots using the proximity sensor, just activate the app in the background, navigate to the screen you want to capture and cover the proximity sensor on the top right of the device. Then you can choose to save the screengrab or take a new one.

• Photo Frame: Another app published by Nokia that lets you frame pictures and then share them. There are a bunch of frames available.

• Rainbow Brush: Brilliant photo manipulation app,  it lets you quickly and easily give photos a dramatic look by converting them to black and white, while keeping your chosen details in color. This effect draws the viewer’s attention to the colored areas, creating striking images. You simply use your finger as a brush to remove or bring back the original color from regions of your image. You can zoom in or out to ensure your get the right finish. Highly recommended.

• FlickrUp: A great tool to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr, you can create photosets, define the resolution, set privacy settings in addition to adding tags and descriptions. Has a pretty UI as well.

• Mes Input: An app that lets you add different keyboard to the N9. Like with Swype, you can swipe from the edge to switch between them. For example, I have a keyboard which gives me quick access to smileys, similarly there are a bunch of other options available. You can even create your own keyboard at www.mesinput.com and use this app to install it on the phone.

• Resource Monitor: As the name suggests, this app lets you keep track of the resources that are being used on your device. You can switch between different views that show RAM, Storage and Processes.

• Date Event: The N9′s events screen shows news, Facebook and twitter streams, but it does not show your upcoming calendar entries and that’s where this app comes in. It displays upcoming entries on the events screen and lets you choose which calendar to pull them from. You can also select the number of days it should show entries from. It is still being developed and isn’t in the Nokia Store, get it here directly .

• 3D World Gaze: Cool app for exploring the world around you, built with the premise that the Earth is a giant sphere and we are always on top of it. What follows is that far-away continents and cities are in reality somewhere below you and not linear, like we usually think of them. Detailed write up and video demo here.

So these were my top 20 free apps for the N9/N950. I’m sure I’ve missed out on quite a few other awesome apps, please let me know in the comments section or on Twitter and I’ll do a follow up post!

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Swype is something I absolutely love, so I was pretty disappointed when it didn’t ship with the N9, specially when we’d seen early demos of it working on the N9. But better late than never, the PR 1.1 firmware started rolling out for the N9 today and with it Swype makes a debut on the N9, and its worth the wait.

It isn’t activated out of the box, so you need to goto Settings> Time and Language> Text Input and enable it first. Then you can swipe away the default N9 keyboard and switch to swype (all of this is demoed in the video below).

As you can see, the keys are nicely spaced out furthering Swype’s goal to be both a ‘Swype’ keyboard and a good thumb type board at the same it. There’s inbuilt auto correction, word prediction and a bunch of other options. We go through everything in the video below.

(Available in HD)

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A major update has just been rolled out for the Nokia N9 in the form of version 20.2011.40-4. The update is 218.6 MB in size and can be installed over the air. It brings music controls to the lockscreen, improved multitasking and NFC Tag reading amongst other things. Another major reason to update is the presence of Swype, which you can enable it by going into Settings> Time and Language> Text Input.

Along with the update, a bunch of pre-loaded applications including Twitter, Facebook, Store, Ovi Music, Galaxy on Fire 2, Nokia Drive, Angry Birds, AccuWeather, NFS Shift, Real Golf 2011 and the User Guide have also been updated.

It is possible that the update isn’t available for all product codes just yet. But if your device hasn’t informed you of the updated already, you can go to Settings>Applications>Manage Applications>Updates and check for updates manually.

The updated Twitter application should bring the ability to Twitpic images, something we have missed since the start. The Facebook client gets a few bug fixes too.

Once downloaded, the update seems to take a while to install so make sure you have enough free time before you begin the update.

[Update: Find the Swype for N9 hand-on video here].

The official changelog:

• NFC tag reading to instantly interact with NFC tags
• Music controls on lock screen
• Photo and video shooting with color filters: black & white, sepia, vivid, negative, solarize
• More powerful multitasking with improved memory handling
• Swype for fast typing
• Faster MfE synch, synchronizing only active folders
• Noice cancellation reduces background noise so that your friends hear you better
• Close apps easily with swiping down, this now on by default
• New indicators for standby screen like charging and calendar
• Pre-loaded apps including: Twitter, Nokia Store, Facebook, Real Golf, Ovi Music, Galaxy on Fire 2, Nokia Drive, Angry Birds NFC, AccuWTwitter, Nokia Maps and the User Guide have also been updated.

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Developers have blessed the Nokia N9 with a bunch of very good internet radio apps in the past, but there’s nothing like getting an Internet Radio app directly from Nokia. So if you head over to the Nokia Store on the N9 and search for ‘Internet Radio’ (direct store link) you’ll be presented with the free download, which to no surprise of ours is an excellent iteration.

Once installed, curiously the app is called ‘IP Radio’. The UI is similar to the default music player with album art being replaced by cover art for the featured radio stations. This is followed by a ‘Hot Picks’ tab, Locations, Language and Genre. Needless to say, you sort a ton of pre-loaded stations by region, language or genre, and this makes discovery a real breeze.

If you like a station you’ve listened to, you can favourite it for quick retrieval. You can also search for more stations and finally tapping that man in the bottom right corner takes you to your history, neat. I’ve been playing with the app for a little while and it feels very polished.  I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending that you download it, just watch your data connection!

In case you have any problems downloading, you can use this method to download the .deb to your desktop and try side loading the app.

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Nokia 3D World Gaze is a pretty cool app built with the premise that the Earth is a giant sphere and we are always on top of it. What follows is that far-away continents and cities are in reality somewhere below you and not linear, like we usually think of them.

So how it works is that you simply point your phone in a direction and it lets you see through the surface (and insides) of the planet all the way to the other side. You can use it to explore your immediate surroundings or fly to any part of the world. In addition to geographical features such as continents in their real physical locations, Nokia 3D World Gaze allows you to see geotagged media, day and night regions, current location of the Sun, and other content from locations around the world.

So while looking at an area of the world, you can tap the pictures button to see pictures from that region or the latest news. The N9 version even features Wikitravel searches based on city name. Have a look at the demo to see how it actually works.

The application has just become available for the Nokia N9 on Nokia’s Beta Labs and has been available for Symbian devices for a sort while now. Try it here.

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The Nokia N9 has been a somewhat difficult subject for Nokia, one that they are, and should be, immensely proud of. But one that has raised more questions than answers. When the February announcement with Microsoft came, everyone wondered what was happening to Nokia’s upcoming MeeGo phone. Nokia was quick to point out that they would indeed release a MeeGo based device. Then word started coming out that the original MeeGo device, which we now know as the developer only N950, had been canned, and replaced by a beautiful new touch only flagship.

Soon enough, Nokia Connections came and Nokia unveiled the N9. The reaction to that device was incredible, ranging from people calling for Elop’s head because of his decision to kill MeeGo, to calmer, saner voices wondering if Nokia should keep the MeeGo project going, if for nothing but just to keep Microsoft in check. Then we found out that the N9 would only be available in a handful of countries, the world was literally shocked. It made no sense, why release a product at all if you weren’t going to ship it to major markets such as UK, India, US among others. While the world waited and hoped that Nokia would reconsider, another thing happened.

A device code named Sea Ray, which we now know as the Lumia 800 leaked. Infact, Stephen Elop’s entire presentation to the employees, which was supposed to be shared on the company intranet, got out. Some called it a controlled leak, while most just took the device in and didn’t care as long as the could look at an unreleased Nokia phone, specially a secret Nokia Windows Phone. The result was that a lot of the chants of ‘bring the N9 to my country’ stopped. Nokia’s policy was finally beginning to make sense, they weren’t going to release a device that looked just like the N9 in the same market as the N9, specially when that device would define their foray into the Windows Phone market.

The N9 shipped to positive reviews, mine included, but the consensus among the reviews clearly was that as much as they loved the device, they couldn’t honestly recommend the N9 to someone knowing that the Sea Ray was around the corner. But the N9’s core strengths really came through, a breath-taking design, a unique yet intuitive UI that made sense, and judging by the Maps and browser, Nokia could do software.

Finally, last week the Lumia 800 was revealed at Nokia’s megaevent with literally thousands watching. The stock market liked what they saw and the Nokia stock started climbing. A did a quick hands on and unboxing and then two days later a much more through (p)review. I really seemed to like the device.

This is when we all wondered, if we had not seen the N9 before would we have loved the Lumia 800 even more? The short answer to that question for me is yes. When you first look at that design, most people go head over heels over it and if Stephen Elop got on stage at Nokia World and showed off that design for the first time, we’d have had an even bigger WOW.

Now for the long answer, knowing that the Sea Ray was coming, should Nokia have released the N9? I’d again say yes. Why? First and foremost, the people in the countries where the Lumia 800 is going on sale haven’t seen the N9. So for a vast majority the design is fresh, new and amazing. The minuscule minority, which has seen the design before will still love it, its still less than two months old in the real world and Windows Phone doesn’t make it any less pretty. Infact, I’d say that the jazzy WP UI is a great match to the N9’s physical design.

Next, in various interview Elop’s stated that it was a great platform for Nokia to learn from, see what people like and go on from there. He’s made it clear that none of the N9’s strength’s are going away. We’ve already seen the design used with the Lumia 800, Qt is coming to the next billion and the Swipe UI will apparently make its way to Meltemi, Nokia’s now not so secret platform for low-mid range devices.

Finally, the period between February to October was long and painful. Nokia was bleeding marketshare and on top of that mindshare, which we all know can be as bad as loosing marketshare. The N9 showed the world that innovation was still alive and well at Nokia and that the Finnish giant was far from dead. The message was imagine if this is what we can do alone, think about what we’ll do with Windows Phone in a few months.

At the end of the day, the glory period for the N9 is over. Its all about the Lumia 800 now, no matter how you feel about open source versus the closed Windows Phone platform, its water under the bridge. With the marketing blitz planned for Windows Phone devices, only the die hards will cherish the N9 and don’t get me wrong, it’s a device meant to be cherished. The N9 will keep selling in countries where the Lumia 800 isn’t shipping as yet and I’m sure Nokia will provide great support for it, but its time for the Lumia 800 to hold the Nokia torch.

The N9 will remain a crown jewel in Nokia’s arsenal, a hacker’s phone, a Qt device to help prime the developers for the next billion. So I don’t fault Nokia for announcing it and then the Lumia 800, look at what Apple did with the iPhone 4 and 4S, those things even run the same OS! The N950 would never have been able to generate the kind of buzz for Nokia that the N9 did, it bided time for the transition and it was never a lost cause. Nokia’s goals with the N9 were just, lets say, different.

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In my last post about the Nokia N9, we went through a customary unboxing and a quick overview of the device. I also shared a few initial impressions.

This time, we delve a little deeper into the N9′s Swipe UI, go over some of its settings and look at the best ways to setup the N9 for daily use.

I also look at two must have applications for the N9, Swipe Manager and Shortcuts. Swipe Manager brings consistency to your swipes and with the ability to define what action each directional swipe does. For example, you can set it to open the app drawer if you swipe from bottom to top, events view if you swipe from right to left and so on. This makes sure that no matter what you want to do, close an app, goto the launcher, the app switcher or the events view, everything is just a single swipe away.

Next is Shortcuts, it lets you change the four default quick access app on the N9, which the phone won’t let you change otherwise.

What follows is the ten minutes with the Nokia N9 video:

Want me to cover something specifically? Let me know in the comments section below!

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The N9 is here, I have the black 64 GB variant and I can tell you that the moment you lay your eyes on it, you will be able to say that the N9 in a class of its own. It is easily the best looking device on the market today, truly a pinnacle of Nokia’s design prowess. It feels very premium, the curved display looks spectacular and the whole distraction free (read button free) surface is a real pleasure to look at.

With that in mind, I put together a little unboxing video (available in HD) for you. In addition to the obvious unboxing, I give you a bit of an overview of the product along with a look at the rubber case that Nokia ships with it. Also included in the box are brand new accessories that Nokia specially designed for the N9, all of which look great.

That aside here a few quick initial impressions as precursor to the detailed review which will follow:

• The N9, owing to the unibody design and the polycarbonate finish feels incredibly solid in the hand. Since there are literally no moving parts, it feels great in the hand.

• The display on the N9 is terrific, the screen very close to the surface of the glass and it feels as if you’re touching it directly; almost makes you feel like its floating on top. Easily gives the Super AMOLED Plus on the Galaxy S2 a run for its money, and because its almost the same resolution on a smaller screen (3.9″ v 4.3″), its a lot more crisp.

• The phone feels responsive, and you’re at home with the Swipe UI in a matter of minutes. Its very intuitive and makes you wonder why nobody else thought of it before. Enabling swipe down to close an app from the settings is recommended, it makes the experience better. There are two more apps that help tremendously, Swipe Manager and My Moves, more on them later.

• The camera is FAST. The shot to shot time is incredible and you want to keep taking pictures once you get going.

• The pre-loaded Twitter and Facebook apps are capable, they cover all the bases. The only thing missing is the ability to share pictures on Twitter and that ability is apparently coming in a future update.

• The out of box service support is great, you can directly upload to Flickr or YouTube. Have multiple Mail for Exchange accounts, other email accounts, and even make Skype calls from the dialer itself. There is also support for IMs on Facebook, Skype and Gtalk.

• The N9 makes it hard for you to find a fault with it, if you forget the direction Nokia is going in for a minute.

Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below, or on Twitter @v4ibhav.

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Nokia’s Ideas Project is looking for your feedback on the N9 user interface and is offering 10 Nokia N9 smartphones in return. They are looking for ideas to improve some of the key features shown off in this video and other innovative ideas for the next generation of mobile touch screen devices.

So if the N9 isn’t launching in your country and you were looking forward to one, here’s your chance. Head over to the Ideas Project and start brainstorming. The ideas will be reviewed by Nokia’s interface designers and 10 winners will get a N9 each.

Timeline:

• Begins: October 12, 2011 at 09.00am EET (GMT+2)
• Ends: November 15, 2011 at 5pm EET (GMT+2)

Panel of judges:

• Nikki Barton, Vice President, Smart Devices UX Design, Nokia
• Peter Skillman, Vice President, Services ＆ MeeGo Design, Nokia
• Anton Fahlgren, Senior Design Manager, Nokia

Challenge hosts:

• Ronan MacLaverty, Developer Advocate, MeeGo
• Heli Haapkylä, Manager, Crowdsourcing, Nokia

Good luck!

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Here’s some more good news for prospective N9 owners, the popular Sports Tracker app is also coming to MeeGo and the Nokia N9. While the app is expected to be released in November, the developers have already shared a few screenshots of what it looks like, and I have to say it’ll be one of the better looking apps on the N9.

The Sports Tracker app on the N9 will feature all the tracking capabilities you’ve come to expect from Sports Tracker and also support for the new Sports Tracker Heart Rate Monitor. It you’re keen on keep up with the developers, you can follow them on  Twitter and Facebook.

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The popular is video playback tool VLC is coming to the Nokia N9, and if you’re willing to use beta pre-release software, then its here already. The app is still in the early phase of development, but if you’re itching to play that seemingly unsupported codec on your shiny N9 or N950, then there’s hope.

However, there are a few known issues like the fact that the UI is isn’t optmised for the phone, so its tedious work. Hardware-accelerated video decoding is not supported (however, color space conversion and scaling are hardware-accelerated). So its best not to throw those HD videos at it yet.

If you’re feeling courageous, head over to this page and you’ll find all the instructions you need to download and install the app.

Hat tip to @nsuffys for the find.

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In some very big news coming on the sidelines of Intel’s AppUp Elements Conference, the LiMo Foundation and the Linux Foundation today announced a new open source project, Tizen, to develop a Linux-based device software platform. Tizen will be a standards-based, cross-architecture software platform which supports multiple device categories including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks and in-vehicle infotainment systems.

We had been hearing rumors about how Intel was going to pause MeeGo development after Nokia backed out, and today we’ve received official confirmation, its all about Tizen from now.

Meanwhile, a post has also gone up on the official MeeGo blog taking about Tizen and ‘What’s Next For MeeGo?’. The question on everyone’s mind is why Tizen? Also, why didn’t they just incorporate all the new capabilities into MeeGo? The answer on the official post to that is:

We believe the future belongs to HTML5-based applications, outside of a relatively small percentage of apps, and we are firmly convinced that our investment needs to shift toward HTML5. Shifting to HTML5 doesn’t just mean slapping a web runtime on an existing Linux, even one aimed at mobile, as MeeGo has been. Emphasizing HTML5 means that APIs not visible to HTML5 programmers need not be as rigid, and can evolve with platform technology and can vary by market segment.

Granted, this is a judgment on our part on which reasonable people could disagree, but that’s the conclusion I came to.

My guess is that if Intel needed a big manufacturer to step into Nokia’s place, they needed to get rid of the MeeGo brand. No one would start developing for a platform which Nokia thought was not worth it, nevermind the underlying technologies, the name had to go. There was a lot of chatter about Samsung stepping up, and it seems a the companies got together, decided to work together and better MeeGo with deeper HTML5 support amongst other things and call it Tizen.

Infact, a few very interesting words can be found on the Intel AppUp Developer blog post commenting on Tizen:

For those speculating on rumors per Intel & Samsung, I trust this news is more encouraging than what was bounced around in the blogosphere. This is not a two company story. With the Tizen platform, the Linux Foundation and LiMo unite, driving more choice and open innovation.

Tizen’s development will be led by Intel and Samsung and an initial release of Tizen is targeted for Q1 2012. The first devices running Tizen are expected to come to market in mid-2012.

DEVELOPMENT

With Tizen, the aim is to use HTML5′s capabilities and cross platform flexibility and the Tizen SDK and API will allow developers to use HTML5 and related web technologies to write applications that run across multiple device segments, including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, in-vehicle infotainment, and netbooks. Intel’s AppUp center will be expanded to support Tizen with Intel AppUp as a store front for multiple Tizen device implementations.

MEE-GO?

So is MeeGo well and truly dead? The answer to that again comes from Intel’s App Developer blog:

MeeGo continues for our devices in market. MeeGo is a great choice for emerging markets and we’ve seen amazing devices already like the ASUS EeePC x101. AppUp continues to support MeeGo and we encourage MeeGo developers to continue to build and submit apps for our netbook devices in market. We also encourage MeeGo developers to consider a common development framework of HTML5 to bridge development between MeeGo and Tizen devices. And on the netbook side the MeeGo neetbook apps in the Intel AppUp center will be compatible and will run unchanged with Tizen netbook. So for those developers who invested in MeeGo for netbooks your apps will continue on Tizen netbooks.

Since MeeGo is open source, it will never truly be ‘dead’ in technical terms, but will it ever go mainstream? No. For that there’s Tizen. Therefore the MeeGo blog states:

Over the next couple of months, we will be working very hard to make sure that users of MeeGo can easily transition to Tizen, and I will be working even harder to make sure that developers of MeeGo can also transition to Tizen.

So there you go, here’s another open source operating system that sees Intel partner with a large smartphone manufacturer. The Nokia partnership was a bust, but Intel is looking to learn from those lessons and come back hard with Samsung as a partner this time.

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Nokia Conversations has just let word slip that the Nokia N9 is now well and truly on its way to consumers around the world at an unsubsidized price of EUR 480 for the 16GB and EUR 560 for the 64 GB variant. Sadly there are no specifics about which countries are getting the device, so you will still need to visit your local stores to find out.

The only thing that’s certain is that the N9 will soon start popping up in the wild and you will start seeing more and more unboxing videos. Nokia had opened pre-orders in certain countries a couple of weeks back and consumer demand seemed to have been huge, with the Finnish pre-orders threatening to exceed the supply.

In another post, Nokia while promising future software support for the device states that ‘The first updates will be based on feedback received from operators and consumers and they make the device even more intuitive than before. The availability and content of the updates will be communicated closer to the download start‘.

While it seems the N9 will not be coming to a lot of the major markets around the world,  you should be able to import the device from other markets very soon. With Nokia World and the first Nokia Windows Phones under a month away, are you considering getting the N9?

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The best foursquare app for Symbian and MeeGo Harmattan devices (N9/N950) has just received an update that brings with it the ability to view photos associated with the venue and read and leave tips. You cannot add photos yet, but hopefully that’s coming in the next version.

Apart from that it now also remembers your search history and adds some UI modifications to make the app look even more pretty. If you are using a N950 or a N9, the 4squick experience should be better for you, although UI is still directly from Symbian^3 build so everything is a bit small due to the higher resolution in Harmattan.

Changelog:

• Venue photos support
• Tips support
  • Read venue tips
  • Add a new tip
  • Share added tip to Twitter and Facebook
  • Mark tips as todo / done
• Search history with top searches
• Multiple fixes and UI modifications
• A bit better Harmattan experience

4squick isn’t available on the Ovi Store yet, but you get get the .sis or .deb file from the download page. If you are new to 4squick, check out the video demo we did last month.

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Nokia has rolled out a beta of the Ovi Store for the developer only Nokia N950. While the release is still beta, it does give us an idea of what the Ovi Store will look like on the not so widely available Nokia N9. The design of the store is based on the MeeGo Harmattan UI that can be seen on the rest of the device with certain similarities with the Ovi Store on Symbian.

The N950 will find the Ovi Store automatically, but if you don’t see it, you can go to settings, applications and check for updates. Since the client is beta and the developer devices aren’t upto speed with the internal Nokia firmwares, there might be a few applications that have installation issues.

Most of the available applications will work on your N950 and existing publicly available firmware (1.2011.22-6). However, there are a few applications in OVI Store that are created with newer pre-production SDK that may fail to install in your device for now. These applications will work also on your device after we have the next SW update available. If a downloaded application does not install, your download history in Ovi Store means that once you have the newer firmware you can download/install the application.

I’m surprised Nokia is still calling it the Ovi Store, after killing the Ovi brand a few months ago. My Nokia Blog a bunch of screenshots if you’re keen on checking the store out in a little more detail.

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Online retailer Indiaplaza has listed the Nokia N9 on its website, with an expected availability date of October 2011. They’ve even gone on to list the price at a cool Rs. 32,368 which translates to a little over 700$. There is no word on whether this is the price for the 16 GB version or the 64 GB black variant.

But before you get your hopes up, for all we know the Indiaplaza page might just be a placeholder or something they’ve put up to draw more visitors. A quick query on Twitter told me that Indiaplaza’s reputation isn’t right up there with the best, so take this with a pinch of salt.

That being said, the N9 India page does say that the device will have manufacturer’s warranty and that means Indiaplaza will not be importing and selling the N9 on their own, but officially via Nokia.

The markets for the N9 have increased since the initial 23 country announcement and we’ve had reason to suspect that the N9 might be coming to India. The N900 came to India very late in the product’s life cycle, here’s hoping Nokia won’t make the same mistake twice.

Thanks for the tip, Avinash Shenoy.

[Update: It seems that the N9 has disappeared from India Plaza's website. So much for that].

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The popular and perhaps the best Facebook client for Symbian devices, fMobi is now available for the Nokia N900 as well. The full featured client packs in all the Facebook functionality that you would want like notifications, access to the news feeds, messages and even chat.

It features:

• News feed
• Chat
• Profile
• User info
• Messages
• Check In / Places
• Sound notifications
• Top Friends
• Liked Pages
• Groups
• Events
• Commenting / Liking
• View comments / likes
• Albums / Photos
• Notifications
• Landscape / Portrait
• Black / White theme

fMobi on the N900 (Maemo 5) comes with the chat functionality disabled out of the box, and because this is the first release there might be some connection popup issues if you don’t have a network connection and you enable chat. You can give feedback here, and download the .deb fMobi file for the N900 from this link.

That’s not all, here is something for you N950 and prospective N9 owners, fMobi is also coming to MeeGo soon.

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We finally have official word on when the Nokia N9 will launch – 49 days from today. The official countdown has gone live on the Nokia Sweden N9 page, so the launch date will probably be just valid for Sweden, but it does give us a pretty accurate estimate of when we can expect the device in other parts of the world.

Nokia Sweden has been at the fore-front of N9 marketing, they’re even giving 30 N9′s away. There is still no clarity on the which countries will get the N9, but we now know that the list has grown from the original 23 and includes South Africa, Italy, Brazil etc.

[via: Engadget]

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The brilliant N9 Seconds competition, after giving people around the world sleepless nights and barely productive days at work, is now over. With that comes an end to the misery of not being able to break the codes, which I’m sure all of us have spent countless hours over. So if you’re wondering what exactly you had to do in order to break the code and win yourself a Nokia N9, wonder no more as the Nseries blog has published a key.

Some were easy, some hard and some codes needed your to be a certified geek before you could get close. As you will see, you were very close to cracking some of them, even the hard ones. I know I was.

Many congratulations to the 20 winners and to Nokia for pulling off an exceedingly exciting competition. We can’t wait for the next one! For now, head over to the Nseries blog.

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