Bad news for anyone who was excited about the Nokia N9 — the MeeGo-powered mobile will not be coming to the UK, Nokia has confirmed in a statement to mocoNews.
The statement says the decision to axe the phone, which we were actually quite excited about, says, “Although we are delighted with the very positive reception that the Nokia N9 has received, here in the UK there are no plans to offer the N9 at present.”
Heartbreaking stuff! In fact, before reading on we recommend opening this link in a new tab, to properly drive home the anguish.
It looks like we won’t be seeing the N9, not any time soon at least. The N9 is the first Nokia phone we’ve actually been excited about for years, so why is the Finnish mobile company not gracing us with its presence?
Well, we know Nokia has Windows Phones planned in the near future, and we suspect it doesn’t want to risk confusing shoppers with Nokia mobiles running radically different operating systems coming out at the same time. That leaves the N9 alone, left out in the cold, the ugly duckling of the flock, shivering in the shade of its glamorous Windows Phone brothers. Alone. Unwanted. Unloved.
We’re kind of gutted, but on the other hand we already knew that Nokia was abandoning MeeGo, the operating system powering the N9, before it was even announced, and so it would be a truly one-of-a-kind mobile.
That lent the N9 a kind of grim poetry, but we’d still have shied away from buying one — when it comes time to upgrade, you’d have to switch to a different OS, and risk losing all your apps and other goodies.
mocoNews also reports that the Nokia N9 will also not be headed to the States, and will be ending stateside sales of its Symbian devices and low-end Series 40 handsets.
This is a brave new age for Nokia, and it seems to be putting all its eggs in one Windows Phone-shaped basket. Can Nokia’s hardware clout make Windows Phone popular enough to combat iOS and Android? Cry your eyes out in the comments section below, or on our Facebook wall.