Everything worked in harmony on the N9. Even the slightly curved screen worked together with the swipe-based interface. It'd be brilliant on an all-screen phone like an iPhone X (so would its successor Sailfish for that matter). No buttons to emulate.
I wrote a post about the alarm clock[1] a while ago, which I feel is pretty indicative of the thought that went into each feature.
Too bad about the rare bug that never got fixed that could show a received SMS under the wrong contact. Or the bug (which did finally get fixed by the community) where if you received an SMS with emoji in it, it would silently just never show the whole message at all!
Killed by the Symbian feud within Nokia and being considered "a toy" by other higher ups, hence the Maemo/Meego rewrite instead of focus and shipping
(I might say one of the issues with lack of focus was relying too much on desktop linux components, as Android went down a different path, but that's a discussion for another time)
