14 DAY TRIAL // Although everyone thought that the next Nokia smartphones launched on the market will be either old Symbian phones or the highly-anticipated Mango handsets, the Finnish handset manufacturer introduced new MeeGo devices
The company has recently announced the Nokia N9, one of the first smartphones to run Linux-based MeeGo platform developed by Nokia and Intel.
Furthermore, the handset maker has quietly launched a second MeeGo device, the Nokia N950, which was especially created for developers.
Unlike the N9, the N950 features a slightly larger 4-inch AMOLED touchscreen display (854 x 480 pixels) and the chassis is made out of pure aluminum, while the N9's body is made of a polycarbonate plastic.
However, due to the use of different display technologies, developers should avoid one pixel with fonts and graphical objects with lines one pixel wide.
In addition, the N950 comes with a physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but does not have support for NFC.
Even though both cameras have very similar image quality, the N950 has a different physical camera module than N9, which comes with Carl Zeiss lenses.
Nokia N950 supports Bluetooth version 2.1 with EDR, but the N9 is much better as it is delivered with Bluetooth 4.0 on board.
Software-wise, it is worth mentioning that the N950 phone software is in beta stage and does not represent the final quality or feature set which will be available when Nokia N9 is commercially available.
For developers, Nokia also recommends that the USB needs to be in SDK (from Settings / Accessories / USB) before connecting to SDK via USB (or use Always ask mode and then selecting SDK mode when connecting with USB).
Both Nokia N9 and N950 are equipped with similar CPUs, a single core ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP3630 processor clocked at 1GHz, complemented by a PowerVR SGX530 GPU, and feature 1GB of RAM.
The N950 is likely to have limited availability, as it only aims developers, which means it won't be commercially available.