For all the fact that the newly announced Nokia N9 is clearly a very capable smartphone, it creates a significant headache for Nokia is it runs MeeGo, the platform the Finns so publicly turned their back on back in February.
It's clear Nokia just wants the N9/MeeGo episode out of the way – after all, why else would boss Stephen Elop allow himself to be publicly filmed showing off a WinPho development unit just days after the N9's arrival.
Scan through the press releases Nokia served up for the N9's launch and you won't find the word MeeGo too prominently mentioned, and the reason is obvious: the N9 likely to be the only MeeGo Nokia ever released, and Nokia wants the attention back on the Windows Phone project as quickly as possible.
And it looks like CEO Stephen Elop has managed to achieve just that, thanks to a bit of old-fashioned media gamesmanship.
The Nokia boss treated a select audience to a special surprise this week: a look at Nokia's first Windows Phone. And then he made sure they told the world about it... by asking them not to.
Elop specifically asks the attendees to put their cameras away, saying that “this is something that is super confidential and we do not want to see out in the bloggersphere”.
And of course the audience snapped up the bait and lo and behold, today we see a 20-minute clip from Hungarian site Technet.hu showcasing the demo handset – codenamed “Sea Ray” – in considerable detail.
From a visual point of view, the WinPho Nokia looks rather a lot like the Nokia N9 as it happens, though given that it's a good few months before the final version hits the streets, there's no guarantee that the design is final.
Either way, we've reached the end of the week talking about a handset that shares all of the N9's design strengths, but runs Windows Phone as its operating system. And we get the feeling that's exactly what Stephen Elop wanted.
