Nokia World 2011: Live coverage

White Nokia N9 hands-on

One of the unexpected visitors at this year's Nokia World was a Nokia N9, dressed in shiny white. The MeeGo flagship was only available in blue, black and pink at launch, but the Finns used their biggest event of the year to introduce a white version.

Clearly Nokia has taken note of the extremely warm reception that the N9 got from both users and journalists and are focusing more effort in its way. Plus, they are probably using the MeeGo smartphone as a testing platform for certain features that will eventually make it to its WP twin, the Nokia Lumia 800.

Anyway, the white color isn't the only change that this new Nokia N9 version brings. Apparently the matte finish of the other colors was found to be incompatible with it as it showed all dirt too easily and the phone quickly lost its looks. So Nokia decided to make the white N9 glossy instead as that would make it much harder to mess up.

Now we really prefer the regular N9 finish as it feels much better to touch, but there's no denying that the white edition looks stunning and if glossy is what it took to make it, then so be it.

There are no changes to the internals of the N9 that the white edition brings, so it's strictly a matter of choosing the color that suits you best here.

NFC Tag writer for Symbian demo

With Nokia World 2011 being all dedicated to the Mango-running Lumias and how awesome they are, it's hardly a surprise that it was rather quiet on the Symbian front. There was just one Symbia-related announcement and that was the NFC Tag-writer app.

As it says on the cover, the new app lets you write NFC tags with your NFC-enabled Symbian smartphone. It has a neat and simple interface that you can check out in action the following video.

We are yet not sure what the real-life applications of this technology will be, but it certainly has a lot of potential. Imagine putting your SatNav-enabled phone on your car’s dashboard next to an appropriate NFC sticker tag and your phone getting automatically into Navigation mode with Bluetooth turning on for hands-free call handling.

Or making business cards with built-in NFC tags that would be really easy to import in a smartphone's phonebook or even calling it directly by simply touching the NFC-enabled card. Or imagine placing a tag on your nightstand and making your phone automatically switch off its Wi-Fi network and ringer when you place it on it. Or… well, you get the idea, but those are ideas only for now and we'll see how long it takes for developers to take it to the next level. We're counting on you.

Now watch how easy it is to create a new NFC tag: