The Nokia N97 is Nokia’s 3rd touchscreen smartphone. The first being the Nokia 7710 and the second being the very popular Nokia 5800. Announced at Nokia world 2008 it’s Nokia’s new flagship after the failure of the wannabe flagship Nokia N96, the Nokia n97’s predecessor. Its also Nokia first phone that has a side-sliding-tilting screen.

N97 and Nokia 5800

Width difference. No difference to the naked eye.

Photo Browser on both devices

Design:

The N97 has a very intriguing design. According to Axel Meyer, head of the team that designed the Nokia N97, said that the and his team traveled around the world asking people what type of phone do they think they would like to have in the future. This is how the n97 was born. A laptop-ish multimedia phone.

Front view

Back of the Sliding mechanism

Build quality:

The build quality of the Nokia N97 is top-notch, only, quite surprisingly, this stands only for the slider. Nokia hasn’t had a good history of making proper sliders. The N95 family(excluding the N95 8GB) until the N85 have all had bad sliders. The thing is that Nokia have used 3 hinges to control the side sliding. Which somewhat compromises the ability to slide the device with one hand(read more in Slider) but gives a solid feeling of the device.
For the month that I had the device I didn’t suffer from any lose slider symptoms that have plagued the N95 and others but one thing I did notice on my last day with the device was a small gap that was forming between the two parts of the device, unfortunately I didn’t have a camera to show it to you and neither can I confirm whether this gap is going to grow.

Update: There have been numerous complaints about the camera cover damaging the phone’s camera lense, my trial device was also affected, scratching my lense cover within hours of me receiving it(more discussed below).

Pros:

1. Nice choice of materials used
2. The metal bezel around the screen is a nice addition
3. The tilting slider is well implemted for a first time
Cons:

1. Slider is difficult to slide in a single handed operation
2. The back cover looks and feels cheap
3. The camera cover has to be fixed, pronto.

Qwerty Keyboard:

The qwerty keyboard on the N97 has been heavily critised for its layout and lack of haptic feedback. Even though its lacks that “click”, one can get used to it in about a day. To prove it, I lent the device to 3 friends for about 7 hours each during which they constantly used the keyboard and at the end of the day, each one of them were able to type a whole paragraph of 4-5 lines in 90 seconds. This shows that even though the device has an odd layout, a very tiny physical space for the keys and the inability to shift into number modesimply by keeping a finger on the desired button. Also, out of the fear of hearing the slider click(devious sound it makes), I would end up writing my messages through the t9 keypad on the touchscreen. Also, another design flaw is the choice of blue for the extra symbols on the keys, this colour gets washed out easily in low light and this is surprisingly due to the strong blue LED light. I hope that nokia fixes this small problem in a future firmware update. All they need to do is dim the blue LED’s a little.

The Keyboard at large

Smallest spacebar in the world.
Pros:

1. Not much to say other than the choice of materials

Cons:

1. Confusing layout. Especially for new users that aren’t accustomed to qwerty keyboards.
2. The small physical space for the keyboard
3. The inability to access the extra symbols using a long press one the desired key.
4. Choice of coulour for the extra symbols, washes out in the dark, caused by the backlight
5. The spacebar on this keyboard might be the smallest I have ever seen

Software:

Since this is my first s60v5 device, my experience has mostly been a miss-and-hit trial. Sadly, the device that I had was not finding any update to v11 I was stuck with v10 and all its bugs. I never got used to the 5800(it was a hate and love relationship, mostly hate though ?). After being used to the iphone OS, it is really difficult to get used to the touch version of s60. It seems that Nokia was in a hurry to release the touch optimized s60 and have pretty much failed to do so, even though they had more than half a year after releasing the 5800 to improve the software but all I see that has been improved is the touch precision and speed of the device. But even though the N97 was announced way back in December 2008, it still came out with a very buggy firmware and many hardware defects. Since s60v5 has already been reviewed for nearly a year, I wont dwelve much into the its functions. But the major improvements are the kinetic scrolling, a welcome addition though it isn’t very smooth, it can still be improved. One of the major bugs were that the theme effects do not work 99% of the time on v10 even though I know that this has been fixed on v11, it will is frustrating for users that don’t know how to update their devices will be disappointed not to have the eye candy animations that they say in the N97 adverts. But one of the funniest bug I have encountered was:

Learn How To Draw “C”.

And I Draw C.

And the N97 thinks I don’t know my alphabets and gives me this above message =)).

Until Then I will leave to enjoy the N97 software and bugs:

The Menu

The Video Gallery.

Inside The Applications Folder

The Landscape Virtual T9 Keypad.

Nokia Maps Launching in Landscape.

Handy Taskman

This bug appears after quick succession of tilting the screen.

The Bug stays even after going into the homescreen

Bug with homescreen without widgets.

In the buggy menu.

The messaging apps does not launch properly in both landscape and portrait mode when launched from the main menu, even when the above mentioned bug is not present.

The Calendar.

Locking the screen does not fix the bug

With a white theme

Proper Landscape Home screen

Landscape homescreen sans the widgets.

RSS feed

Default Email App

Photo Browser

Free Ram

Daily Mobile Blog in the default web browser

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Nokia N97 Gallery

[Thx Rwishi]

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The Next Part Of The Review Will Cover:

• Camera

• Widgets + N97 in everyday

• Media

• Conclusion

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