"Portable Cathedrals"

If you're plugged into your tablet or smartphone for much of the day, you might get a kick out of Dan Hill's essay on the design of the Nokia N9. He takes an almost obsessive look at  the N9- one of the staggering lost opportunities of the past year. As hardware, it went on to father the Lumia line of phones running Windows Phone 7. The N9's open source operating system, Meego, has little if any future.

I'll just add that I owned the predecessor to the N9, the N900. It was a great phone that slammed far too many great design ideas that weren't really ready for primetime when it was released in 2010. The N9 seems to have carried on the tradition of great ideas that just didn't catch on for one reason or another. And because the phone is now one-of-a-kind, and it is so well made in most regards, it should become something of a collectors item for design and technology geeks.

Anyway, I don't want to steal Dan's thunder. Its a very good holiday break read; full of insight, and great words to remember like "skeumorphic".