Nokia N9 unboxed, in the flesh, 2nd impressions

The Nokia N9 arrived at my doorstep yesterday along with the Nokia 701 but I only got to unbox it today since I spent the night at a hotel reviewing Samsung’s 60-inch LED Smart TV. Posted my first impressions here back in June so this unboxing comes with the second impression.

Here’s a run-down of my unboxing with a little commentary on the side.

When I saw the letter that the package contains the Nokia N9 and the Nokia 701, I immediately picked the bigger box thinking it was the N9. Turns out, the much smaller blue one is for the Nokia N9. It’s small, un-assuming and you’d easily mistake it for a box of a regular Nokia phone. Nothing special really.

The box contains the cyan-colored N9, the micro-USB charger, a headphone, and a blue rubber case. Good idea for Nokia to include a rubber case for the N9 and it fits well as if its actually part of the handset.

The SIM card slot is found on the top end of the unit. You need to pop out the micro-USB port cover first, then slide the cover of the SIM card slot and pull out the cradle for the SIM. Then I forgot the Nokia N9 actually uses a micro-SIM card so I had to look for that spare microSIM Smart gave me many months back.

Been using it since this afternoon and what I can say for the short period I’ve used it is that it has the flair of an iPhone, the character of an Android handset and the snappiness & energy of a Windows Phone 7 device.

The handset comes with a lot of pre-installed apps and has Twitter & Facebook right out of the box. FourSquare is just a download away from the Nokia Store and I was even surprised it had the YugaTech App supported in there (seems like Nokia ported the Ovi App into Meego last August 30 based on the info in the store).

The camera is really good too although ISO range is only between 100 to 800. Low-light shots are still crisp and clear but you’d already see some noticeable noise in the images. Will still need to get more samples in daylight to really appreciate the photo quality.

That social stream is pretty neat but once you add your Facebook account in there, it could be really crowded. Good thing there’s an option to filter out the streams based on specific social accounts.

The photo above shows the N9 with a cyan rubber case — hard to tell unless you look really close.

I have to stop my second-impression here (need to login to Starcraft 2 for our weekly session) but stay tuned for the full review around late next week. I’m not keeping my hopes up but my initial impressions of the device so far is a little short of impressive.

The obvious question would be is when this will be out in the Philippines? Well, considering the seeding of the unit just happened this week, I’m thinking 2 to 3 weeks maybe, or 4 weeks tops? Will post more updates once I get them.