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As reported June 21 by our sister site LinuxDevices.com, Nokia this week announced the N9 (pictured), a high-end smartphone running the Linux-based MeeGo operating system. This features a 3.9-inch AMOLED (active matrix organic LED) screen, an eight megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss-branded lens, Dolby Sound, NFC (near field communication), and a Texas Instruments OMAP3430 processor.Nokia has hitched its wagon to the Windows Phone 7 star, however, making the N9 merely a well-endowed orphan. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop emphasized that fact by brandishing the device's Windows Phone 7 successor (below) at a private meeting for the handset manufacturer's employees.
"What is the point? There's a whole collection of innovation in the N9 that is going to live on. The user experience will live on, and so will the beautiful industrial design," Elop said.
"Put away all cameras, turn off all recording equipment -- this is super-confidential and we do not want to see this on the blogosphere," Elop added. Before revealing the Windows Phone 7 devices, he repeated "no pictures."
Yet just a few hours later, a video of the unveiling was leaked to the Hungarian website Technet.hu. Nearly 22 minutes long, this appears to have have been professionally recorded, complete with cutaways to slides, via a camera held above the audience.
Nokia publicity stunt or not, the video reveals a few details about the device code-named "Sea Ray." As noted by Elop, the Windows Phone 7 handset will include the same Gorilla Glass screen, "pillow-shaped" backing, and eight megapixel camera as the N9.
Visible differences are limited to a different LED flash placement on the back, plus an extra button on the side (above) that most likely triggers the phone's camera shutter. Internally, the device presumably switches from the N9's TI processor to a Qualcomm CPU.
The initial crop of Windows Phone 7 devices, whose hardware specifications were tightly controlled by Microsoft, all featured Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 or 8650 processors. Both chipsets feature "Scorpion" application processors, but the QSD8250 supports only GSM, GPRS, EDGE and HSPA networks, whereas the QSD8650 supports both these and CDMA2000 1X, 1xEV-DO 0/A/B networks, according to the chipmaker.
A new Windows Phone 7 hardware specification unveiled at Microsoft's MIX11 conference in April added support for additional Snapdragon CPUs: the MSM7x30 and the MSM8x55. While still single-core devices, these processors allow OEMs to offer a wider range of clock speeds (from 800MHz on the MSM7x30 to 1.4GHz on the MSM8x55, according to Qualcomm), and they also provide Adreno 205 graphics -- said to offer over twice the performance of the Adreno 200 included with the earlier QSD8x50.
No further details of the Sea Ray were mentioned in the video, but a demonstration of the device's software appeared to confirm that the device will include the Mango update to Windows Phone 7. As we've previously reported, this will bring many new features to the smartphone operating system, including multitasking, live tiles, turn-by-turn navigation, texting via voice, and better SkyDrive integration.
Jonathan Angel can be reached at jonathan.angel@ziffdavisenterprise.com and followed at www.twitter.com/gadgetsense.
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