No Nokia N9 for America or UK

Nokia's N9, the long-awaited MeeGo Linux cellphone, won't be coming to the U.S. after all. Engadget's Darren Murph received the "disheartening" news, echoed in UK reports, after asking the company to offer a firm release date.

"After the very positive reception to the launch of the Nokia N9, the product is now being rolled out in countries around the world. At this time we will not be making it available in the US. Nokia takes a market by market approach to product rollout, and each country makes its own decisions about which products to introduce from those available. Decisions are based on an assessment of existing and upcoming products that make up No...

Previously: Nokia’s N9 is “beautifully simple”

• [Digitalus]

  WTF? Nokia, I want N9. If you don’t plan to sell N9 or some future MeeGo smartphone later you can as well leave USA. We don’t want your other Symbian/WP7 crap.

• [Cosme Lozano]

  Hello … where Nokia’s business acumen go ? I would love this phone. I am in the US.

• [ssam]

  i guess we can import them from mainland europe into UK.

• [chris coreline]

  MeeGo and coincidently the N9 were the first smart phone i was going to buy and develop for as my friends were quit into hacking about with its predecessors. i guess ill just have to stay dumb.

• [cheeseleon]

  Bah, Engadget should be happy a contrario, they’ve ben spitting greasy on Nokia products for some years, asking them to return to the dust.

  In a certain way… that’s it.

• [hogan]

  BC… AD…. and now Ai…. After iPhone.
  will everything look like an iPhone from now on?

• [sdmikev]

  pretty cool phone, bummer that.
  also: “Decisions are based on an assessment of existing and upcoming
  products that make up Nokia’s extensive product portfolio and the best
  way in which to address local market opportunities.”Jesus H Christ, can people PLEASE just speak normally???

• [traalfaz]

  Bottom line is that U.S. carriers want nothing to do with phones that they don’t have 100% control over.

• [scifijazznik]

  I think that from now on, all mealy-mouthed corporate and government statements should be formatted exactly as above.  Instead of getting disemvoweled, they could get Beschizzled.

• [technogeekagain]

  There are those of us who still don’t have smartphones, or who (like me) purchased used boxes from a decade ago (Treo) because they run the local software we need and we aren’t particularly seeking “always on” connectivity (though wifi would be nice).

  There is still a market opportunity for someone who Gets It Right, and sells a device which has decent PDA functionality and DIRECT, SECURE synch. I have negative interest in putting my (and my employer’s) data through anyone else’s servers, which tends to kill all the current market leaders.

• [Manja]

  Nokia, give us MeeGo or give us death (or maybe at least Android)

  • [Derek Hunt]

    At the very least, continue supporting and updating Maemo!

• [DewiMorgan]

  “Beschizzled” – nice! :D

  Nokia has essentially been ignoring the US market for some time. It’s a shame, they were by far the best phones to be had while I was in Europe, in terms of UI, features, and build quality. Their Communicator line were like little laptops, with abilities and reliabilities that put modern smartphones to shame [for example, I only had to reboot my Communicator once in a blue moon: Samsung's Fascinate, on the other hand, needs it daily; the Communicator ran the phone as a completely separate OS instance so that even if the smartphone lagged, locked up, or was bricked, you could still use the phone as normal; earlier Communicators even had serial ports so I could connect to routers to fix 'em; and an x86 CPU so I could install DOS apps on them!]

  But for no reason I’ve been able to gather, Nokia phones seem to be the target of scorn here in the US, and have very low market share. I suspect this is from some great marketing fail on the part of Nokia.

  So maybe they found that nobody wanted to carry them, because they felt a Nokia wouldn’t sell, and that would have looked bad for their sales figures.

  But now they’ve got behind WinME, I’m wonder what their agreement with MSFT looks like, and whether it precludes releasing competing OSs in the US/UK.

• [Chris Hudson]

  Disappointing – I hadn’t realised the UK answer was so definitive…. I actually was tempted to back the “other horse” here just because Nokia generally do the on-board software just enough that app market requirements are minimal- meaning I’d be buying a “complete” handset (with no expenditure on extra apps to make it “do things”) because it’s just a sexy handset!

• [salsaman]

  Not selling a flagship smartphone in the US?
  Ian: …the Boston gig has been cancelled.
  Nigel: What?
  Ian: Yeah. I wouldn’t worry about it though, it’s not a big college town.

• [Bloodboiler]

  I guess Elop has to do everything he can to drive the company right into the ground. He has already said that no matter how successful N9 is, Nokia will not do more Meego phones. Since every one who has seen an unpolished N9 has liked it, the only way guarantee failure is to not sell them.

• [shadowfirebird]

  Given that the N9 is basically a last hurrah for a Meego / Nokia phone — since Microsoft now seems to control Nokia — I was in two minds about it anyway.  If they are going to play even more silly buggers than usual (Nokia support of the open source parts of the N900 was problematic and half-hearted, IMO, although the FOSS contributers continue to do a hell of a job) then that makes my mind up.

  When my N900 dies, I’ll swap back to something closed, and carry a netbook with a data plan.

• [toyg]

  As shadowfirebird says, the N9 is basically a zombie product anyway, so no surprise there. Like with the N900, the management’s real interest is to make it fail in the market, in order to validate their idiotic commercial strategies.
  I have a N900, I wrote a few scripts for it, I loved it; with a bit more polish and regular updates, it would have rivalled Android. I now carry an iPhone, and Nokia is dead to me.

  • [Mace Ojala]

    That’s the story of my life too

• [zombienietzsche]

  “pretty cool phone, bummer that.
  also: “Decisions are based on an assessment of existing and upcoming
  products that make up Nokia’s extensive product portfolio and the best
  way in which to address local market opportunities.”Jesus H Christ, can people PLEASE just speak normally???”

  Translation:
  “We (Nokia) do not want to waste marketing money and time in a country we do not perform well in any longer with a product that may not sell, especially if we have other, cheaper products that will perform just as well and need less marketing and manufacturing cost.”

  Not that hard,yo.

• [prentiz]

  Another n900 user here.  Watching Nokia’s slow death-dive is really saf for those of us who’ve trusted the brand since back in the say.  The lack of N9 for these key markets is no suprise, merely a prelude to them bringing out some crappy Windows phone.  If Nokia still exists in three years, as a company that makes anyhting vaguely interesting, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  In the meantime, my next phone will be something generic, chinese and running Android.

  • [digi_owl]

    UK perhaps, but US a key market? US have since forever been the odd bird out when it comes to mobile phone tech. Multiple non-interoperable networks, carriers that lobotomize features that the manufacturers are playing up as selling points elsewhere, all kinds of cray “plans” that salami slice the market for nickles and dimes. I am surprised that Nokia have tried to play along at all!

• [MrEricSir]

  The whole Maemo/Meego thing has been good for developers and open source, but anyone who thought a product was going to come out is seriously deluded.

  If I wanted to place a lot of faith in something that didn’t exist, I’d turn to religion.

• [shadowfirebird]

  I’ve just read that the official Meego site will not be carrying a FOSS apps store (like ‘extras’ for the N900).   FOSS developers are working hard to host it somewhere else, but the official Intel/Meego policy appears to be “we’re not talking”. 

  Details here: http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=4051

• [digi_owl]

  I am guessing the continually shrinking font size is yet another childish Engadget parlor trick. Glad i stopped reading that site.