Nokia N97 Review

N97 is perhaps the most talked about mobile phone from Nokia, even more than their popular 5800 Xpress Music. Destined to be the iPhone Killer can this phone fulfill the expectations? We have made a review to find the answer. In this review you’ll find details of :

• Design


• Keyboard


• Touchscreen


• Browser


• Multimedia


• Connectivity


• Conclusion

Design

Nokia N97 looks to be take the design essence from Google G1 phone to the AT&T Tilt (for its tilted keyboard) to the iPhone. On the outside, N97 has a big 3.5 inch touchscreen that dominates the whole front of the phone. There is a little button at the bottom left side of the device which acts as a shortcut to the N series multimedia applications. The call receive and end keys are touch sensitive. The 3.5 mm headphone jack and a power button is situated at the top of the device. The phone is just a bit thicker (15.9mm) than the iPhone but you have to consider the fact that it comes with a slide out keyboard.

Keyboard

The main factor that make N97 distinct with the iPhone is the presence of an actual hardware keyboard. The sliding of the keyboard feels solid and the angular position of the display of nearly 35-40 degrees feels very comfortable to work with. The keys are evenly placed on the keypad and I faced no serious trouble typing with my thumb. The only drawback is that the key travel is very small so it sometimes needed to be pressed a little hard to make sure that the letters aren’t missed. The position of the spacebar at the right side may also trouble some but I found it to be perfectly intuitive design. The lack of number keys may also bother some.

Touchscreen

Nokia has joined the touchscreen revolution more late that others did. The the touchscreen of N97 does not show that they are lagging behind. The response of the touchsceen is good although sometimes a little inaccurate. Unlike the capacitive touchscreen of iPhone, the resistive touchscreen used in N97 needs some pressure to make the selection and there is no support for multiple touch gestures. However, the Nokia S60 OS seems to be more tweaked to finger sensitiveness than Windows Mobile.

Browser

The Browser of the device seems to be of ancient ages. Zooming in and out is clumsy and oh! where is the search box! Rendering of the websites is muddy due to its underpowered ARM 11 CPU clocking at 434 MHz. Even simple animations seem slow and jerky. We are waiting to see N97’s own version of Firefox or Opera Mobile. But I did like the Facebook app which comes with a widget that sits on the customizable homescreen. Files can be downloaded directly from the web which means I don’t have to be dependent on iTunes to listen to music as in the case of iPhone. Thanks for providing the openness Nokia.

Music, Videos and Camera

There is no dedicated media keys as in N95 or N96 but still N97 is joy for the multimedia lovers. The 3.5 mm headphone jack makes you use any standard headphone. The internal storage of 32GB is more than spacious to store thousands of songs and hours of high quality videos. Moreover, you can expand the capacity adding another 16GB MicroSD Card. The 640X320 pixels widescreen is perfect for watching videos too. However, it doesn’t play AVI files which makes most of my video collections unusable on this device.
The N97’s 5MP autofocus camera takes excellent shots in daylight but the LED flash does not generate enough light to capture pictures in dark situations. The VGA quality video capture is more than good and you can share them using the TV output.

Connectivity

The Nokia N97 supports TV Out, WiFi, GPS, FM Radio and Bluetooth. It can run on any network as it supports Quad Band GSM network. The phone also supports 3G/HSDPA of all standard fequencies so that you can use it with any carrier throughout the world.

Conclusion

The underpowered processor, lack of video codec support and its unorganized OS structure may discourage some potential buyers but Nokia fans would be surely delighted with the nice touchscreen and impressive internal memory. The solid build quality and the superb dual flash LED 5 MP camera of N97 makes the iPhone, Google G1 phone and Blackberry Storm to watch out for this new competitor.


Do you think Nokia N97 can take a large share in the smartphone market or it will be forgotten like the Xperia X1?