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Smartphones these days are also expected to handle Media, and the Nokia N9 does that pretty decently.
Ofcourse the UI helps a lot. Here’s a quick look at the Gallery, and Music Player on the Nokia N9. First up, to give you a better idea, here’s a video:
First up, the Image Gallery. We gave you a quick peek at the Image gallery in our Nokia N9 Camera Overview, but here’s a little more about it.
The Gallery on the N9 is arranged in a simple grid by thumbnails.
At the bottom, you have a selection option to choose what content is shown, which can be quite handy. Tapping on it lets you choose between showing content captured by the N9′s camera, other images, videos, favorites, and your current image tags.
Tags can be very useful to sort your images or organize them better.
One strange/mild annoyance we noticed, was that captured videos are shown in the image gallery, but not in the N9′s Video App.
This is similar behavior to Nokia’s Symbian devices, but it can still get a little confusing for first time users. Ofcourse, you can also play a video right from this view.
When you tap on an image to open it, the image opens fullscreen. A quick tap on the image will give you the following view:
You have the image name and date and time it was taken at the top. If you have Geo-tagged the image, the location will be displayed up here as well. At the bottom, you have the back button, Favourite icon, Sharing icon, Delete, and a ‘More Options‘ icon. Tapping the ‘more options’ key lets you set the image as a wallpaper, avatar, start a slideshow and more:
Tapping on the share icon, takes you to a share view, where you can choose what services to upload the image on.
You have Facebook, MMS, Bluetooth/NFC, etc. The N9 has an accounts section where you can add more accounts, but sadly Twitter is not included in the list just yet. We have it on good authority that it will be in an upcoming update though. Plus if you really need to twitpic an image, you can always email it.
In the main thumbnail image view, you can also tap the ‘more options’ icon to share multiple images in the same method.
Very convenient if you want to upload a batch of images to Facebook.
The Video App itself, lists only two videos when you first open it up. Like we mentioned earlier, I could not get it to list captured videos at all.
There’s support for MP4, H.264/H.263, WMV and both DivX and Xvid videos, but only until 720p resolution. Anything higher and it’ll struggle. We found that it could also play back some MKV files as well, but that was touch-and-go getting only audio on some files. The Videos app lists videos by a large thumbnail.
You can tap on a video thumbnail to play it. The Video player UI is quite nice and simplistic and doesnt get in the way at all.
Ofcourse you can also share the video from here by tapping the more options key.
Coming to the Music Player on the Nokia N9, it’s quite nicely designed. There’s support for MP3, WAV, eAAC+, WMA and FLAC. Sound quality is pretty good thanks to the on-board Dolby Digital Plus tech.
There’s swipe-to-change-song, and all the basic options you’d expect in a mobile music app today. Unfortunately though, there is no equalizer option. When you first start up the music app, you’re presented with the following view:
You have a random grid of album art at the top, which can be tapped on to play the respective song. When you’re playing songs from a playlist or randomly, these album arts change to show you the last few songs you’ve played, which is a nice subtle little ‘feature.’ There’s support for playlists with the usual playlists present:
And opening up a playlist gives you the following view:
You have a grid of random album arts at the top, with a list of the songs in their respective order below, with Song, Album & Artist name and track time. You can tap to play a song, as you’d expect.
When there is no album art, you get the UI above, but if the song has Album art attached to it, you’ll see the UI below:
The Album art prominently takes up the upper part of the screen, with the usual Back, Play/Pause, and Forward Music keys below it, with Favourite, Shuffle and Repeat icons below that. There’s also a ‘track info’ icon on the right hand side, and the usual ‘more options’ key on the right side of the lower bar, which only gives you the following option.
Tapping the ‘Track Info’ icon gives you more information about the track, as well as pulls in more songs by the artist, from Nokia’s Music Store.
A very convenient little feature if you use the Nokia Music Store a lot or usually listen to more than one song by an artist.
If at any time you press the back button, you’ll see a little ticker at the bottom of the screen, showing the song title that’s currently playing.
Apart from playlists, you can also view your music by Artist..
By Albums or by Songs…
Sadly you can view ‘By Genre’ though, which might be important to some folks out there.
There’s also the Nokia Music Store integrated right in, along with a separate app that you can use. Still not rebranded back from ‘Ovi Music Store‘ it seems.
And darn that UI looks great for the Music Store. Tapping on an album art here will take you to the album’s listing page.
Here you can view other songs in the album, or view more info about the song listed.
The Nokia Music Store also has a 30 second preview of each song that you can listen to, if you cant decide on buying it or not.
And ofcourse, plenty of genres to choose from. The Indian Music store has quite the load:
As you’d expect, if you still cant find the Artist or Song you’re looking for, you can also search for it.
And lastly, there’s a ‘My Stuff‘ view which shows your Nokia Music Account details.
This view might be different for some folks since the Indian Nokia Music Store uses a completely different ‘voucher’ system compared to the rest of the world.
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So as you can see, the Music, Image and Video apps on the N9 have a very nice and polished UI. Much like what we thought in our first impressions. I would have liked to have seen an FM Radio and FM Transmitter both on the device but then again, I dont think I’ve used an FM Radio on any of my smartphones in ages.
Music quality is pretty good, and there’s a pretty rich video codec support on the N9. And those videos look gorgeous on that AMOLED Clearblack display. What’s not to love about this phone, eh?
Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile and mobile-related accessories.
Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus 
or on Facebook or Twitter: Follow @clintonjeff
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