GLOBAL – We know that the Nokia N9 has a lot of fans among Conversations readers. Heck, it’s such a lovely phone with some very cool innovations that you can’t find elsewhere.

But is it perfect? Well, that’s a matter of taste. Maybe no phone is ever perfect. Happily, though, people have been busily tweaking their N9 to make it behave even better. These are the hacks I’ve got installed. Maybe you have some of your own favourites. In which case, leave your comments below.

Make your calendar cooler

There are a number of programs designed to better integrate the N9’s calendar into the phone. The one I’m using is Organiser Feed, which does two useful things.

 

First, it makes the icon on the launcher screen reflect today’s date, rather than the 12^th, which is only correct 1/30^th of the time.

The second part of the program adds your forthcoming events to the notifications screen, which is really useful.

Completionists might also want a real-time clock for their launcher icon. I’m not so sure this is necessary, since you can see a clock any time you look at the standby or lock screen.

Connect your contacts

One very useful thing that you can do with both Windows Phone and Symbian based phones is put your most-used contacts onto your home screen, so you can get in touch with them without having to go through the address book every time.

You can’t do that on a Nokia N9 out of the box, but now you can with ContactLaunch. If a lot of your phone use is contacting the same few people, then it really cuts through the palaver of making a call or sending a text. This is the only paid-for item in this list. It costs £1.

 

Sorting out Swipe

The no-buttons, three screen interface of the Nokia N9 has been greeted with acclaim. But there’s something a little quirky about it. If you swipe to the left from a running application, it takes you back to the home screens. But which one? Sometimes it seems random, or it’s never the one that you actually wanted, which is another two swipes left. [There is actually a logic to this: it takes you back to the screen you launched the app from, but it’s easy to forget how you arrived at your current app].

Anyway, there’s no need to play Home Screen Lotto if you install Swipe Manager. You can simply decide what direction means what: if you want a left swipe to take you to the launcher, and right to take you to the task manager, then you can have this, or the reverse, and the same with upwards and downwards.

So what are you ‘must-have’ tweaks for the Nokia N9 interface?