Two big smartphone announcements this morning, and two considerable insights into the prospects of an ailing cellphone giant. Nokia’s new N9 could, with its MeeGo OS, easily have been the Finns fiddling while Rome was burning; the technical previews of Windows Phone 7.1 Mango, meanwhile, could have shown up a platform desperately lagging behind its rivals iOS and Android. Make no mistake, today we’ve seen the biggest glimpse so far of Nokia’s future.

On the one hand, we have the software. Our technical preview of Windows Phone 7.1 “Mango” went live overnight, detailing the changes Microsoft has made to its platform after eight months or so in the wild. There’s a lot to like, too: the threaded messaging, boosted Live Tiles and intuitive multitasking system add up to a smartphone OS that finally feels ready for prime-time.

So closely timed you’d think it had been planned that way – though Nokia tells us it wasn’t – the N9 made its debut. The new handset may not use Windows Phone, instead being Nokia’s first (and, for 2011, only) MeeGo device, but it’s also a good indication of the company’s design direction for the future. Although MeeGo has had far from an easy path to market, the N9 is impressively complete even in the prototype form we played with today.