Nokia N9 like phone running KaiOS coming soon?
Google had a big exhibition space at CES2019, and one installation there got the attention of Nokians.fr. To fight the Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant, Google displayed all the friends of its own digital assistant Hey Google. One part took three phones that run KaiOS. On the left, there was a Nokia 8110 4G, and on the far right one Jio phone. The phone in the middle is an interesting one since it looks quite like something we have seen before in the Nokia line up. You can recognize the Nokia logo on the device even though it is not crystal clear, but it is the same as on 8110 4G so we can definitely say it’s another Nokia phone running KaiOS. The body looks like iconic Nokia N9, and it is in beautiful Cyan color which was characteristic for that phone, but also for the whole polycarbonate Lumia phones in the future. Also, something taken from Nokia N9/Lumia 800 seen on the photo is the door at the top of the device that covers SIM/charging port.
MWC2019 is close, and HMD global has a tradition of showing some kind of revival of an iconic Nokia phone. KaiOS can be seen running on phones with physical keyboards, but that OS has a potential of running on a full touchscreen device. This Nokia N9 looking device could be the first one that will definitely change the future of KaiOS. But, there is also a chance that this maneuver of making N9 a modern feature phone could backfire on HMD since many folks that still have N9 and those which know what N9 brought to the smartphone world could resent that. There are still a lot of N9’s that are fully functional and this would be a kind of degradation of the model. N9 definitely deserves to be brought back, but maybe as a proper smartphone. But, when I give it a second thought, the smartphone design changed in the past 6 years, and N9 would look cool as a feature phone capable of running basic apps like Whatsapp and some other. It would be also cool if the camera would be good enough to create admirable shots so we could rest from fully capable smartphones and save some money for other stuff.
Nice find Nicholas. Thanks for the tip ;).
