So I bought the N95 about six months ago, and I’ve loved it immensely. Despite all the crap people said about battery life, build quality, the fact it runs on Symbian and whatever else, never had a problem with it aside from when the firmware shat itself because I had a powerout while updating.
Fast forward to six months later, I have in my hot little hands the new flagship product of Nokia’s N-Series, the Nokia N97. Truth be told, I wanted the sodding thing ever since it was mentioned on Symbian Freak. While the idea of a touchscreen didn’t exactly get me having a nerdgasm (that is, until I saw the iPhone), I fell in love with the idea of a full QWERTY keyboard on a mobile phone thanks to my Hiptop. Throw in a boatload of storage space and most (if not all) of the features I loved about my N95 and I was pretty much sold.
The N97 comes with the stock-standard features of Nokia’s smartphones, which include a 5MP camera -capable of both photo and video, with a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, Wifi reciever, music and video playback and a GPS reciever. It also still runs on the Symbian S60 platform, which has been upgraded to 5th Edition to incorporate the N97′s touchscreen.
As far as call quality goes, nothing less that you would expect from Nokia. calls are crystal clear and I’ve yet to have a problem in that respect.
Battery life is also pretty decent if you’re not using too many applications, and can last up to two days. I’ve managed to squeeze a touch longer out of it by keeping the homescreen connection offline.
The new features of the N97 include a whopping storage space upgrade of 32GB, which can be complimented with up to a 16GB MicroSD card, a bigger display (640×360, with 16.7 million colours) and the aforementioned touchscreen with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
The touchscreen has a pretty decent response rate, with only the occasional incident of mashing my sausage fingers onto where I want to navigate to seemingly not being picked up. The touchscreen allows the user to do pretty much any task required (make calls, send text messages, etc) and includes an onscreen dialer which is accessible at the bottom of the screen. The phone also comes with a stylus (which looks creepily familiar to the pee stick on a pregnancy test) for people who want to look fancy, or for people like me who are soggy around the fingers as well as the midsection.
You can also customize your home-screen with various widgets and shortcuts, some of which give you updates of social network sites, the weather, and various other odds and ends. The downside to this is that it makes the screen look very cluttered and requires a constant online connection for it to work, but it can be switched to an offline mode and the icons hidden if the need arises.
My main problem with the touchscreen (not that I’ve particularly played with very many) is that it isn’t quite as intuitive as you’d expect from something which is going to rival the efforts of Apple and HTC. Scrolling becomes an odd game of chance depending on the program and it just doesn’t feel as smooth as it should. This however, doesn’t make it too much of a pain to use in the end.
Also available in black, which -going by the pictures from Nokia's website, looks just as gorgeous as the white model
Underneath the touchscreen is the N97′s keyboard. The keyboard is compact, yet fully featured. It’s easy to use and doesn’t feel like it’s going to cramp the hell out of your hands when you use it. My one criticism on the keyboard is that the spacebar is in a weird place, but other than that it’s great. On the left-hand side of the keyboard is a 4-way D-pad for menu navigation.
Around the phone is the standard-issue dedicated camera button, volume controls, stereo speakers, power on/off button and 3.5″ Headphone jack. Not much I can say here… They all work and considering the size, the speakers pump out a good deal of sound. Though anything with large amounts of bass might get a little grating on the ears, so I’ll suggest you either pick up a good set of headphones or hook it up to your speaker system.
Software-wise, the N97 loads applications and performs tasks quickly. My only major complaint being that the phone’s auto-rotation seems a little finicky at times. What I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about however, is the rather ordinary layout of the S60 5th Edition interface. Which I’m sort of inclining to agree with to a point. Again, from a phone thats competing in the same market as the iPhone, the UI seems a little outdated. Despite this, however, It works and does the job it’s supposed to.
As for the camera? the camera is what made me fall in love with the N95 initially. It took photos and videos beautifully, and could just as easily have trumped some of the photo’s I’ve taken with my Pentax Optio S45. As for the camera on the N97? I’m afraid I can’t quite share the same enthusiasm as I did with the N95. My main gripe is that the dual-LED flash is seemingly picked up in photos and is quite noticeable. Whether Nokia acts on this or not remains to be seen, but I have noticed on various Nokia forums that it’s becoming quite a problem.
Video on the other hand is as good as -if not better than the N95, with a neat feature being the “Video Light” which was introduced with the N96. The “Video Light” uses the dual-LED flash as a torch so you can record to your heart’s content in low light situations.
The GPS on the N97 also seems to be a bit dodgy. When road-testing it in Sydney over the weekend, I had problems getting a signal using a WAP service and ended up just using it as a street directory rather than trying to make the thing show me a direction to somewhere. Though this could because of a few issues more related to complications with the carrier I use, not the phone itself.
At the end of the day, is the Nokia N97 the flagship model it’s meant to be? Most signs point to yes. Despite the camera issue and the fact the user interface is starting to lookand feel really outdated, the N97 is a great device and I can’t see much else wrong with it. The memory capacity is brilliant and serves the device as a multimedia platform really well and the new features the phone introduces are quite useful. The keyboard -possibly the best thing about the phone is great and a breeze to use. I wouldn’t say it’ll topple the iPhone’s current reign of being ‘the’ smartphone to have, but Nokia has certainly entered a strong contender