Nokia N97: Review & Specification

The summer of 2009 has definitely been a sizzler for the world of smartphones. The New Nokia N97 introduces the concept of 'social location'. With integrated A-GPS sensors and an electronic compass, the Nokia N97 mobile computer intuitively understands where you are. The release of Nokia N97 is the Nseries counter-move that geeks have been waiting for since November'2008. N97 is one of the most complete smartphones ever created by Nokia, the N97 has been haunting Symbian buffs' dreams for quite a while.


Comparisons to the iPhone started given all its advanced features and the addition of a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard. However, that was almost a year and a half ago and the N97 is just coming to market. In that time, a lot of things has changed: new players have entered the field (hello, Pre) and others device manufacturers and mobile operating systems continued to push forward but, unfortunately, Nokia didn't come along for the ride. But Nokia doesn't disappoint us. Nokia N97 is absolutely filled to the brim with functionality.

However, it's not enough to match a competitor feature for feature anymore. You have to provide quality hardware and a good user experience, and sadly, the N97 falls a bit short in those departments with an inferior resistive touch screen and clunky user interface. The steep $700(46000 Tk BDT) price tag doesn't help either. While the Nokia N97 might appeal to Symbian and N series loyalists, it faces a steep uphill battle against the aforementioned touch-screen smartphones.

Design
From a design standpoint, the Nokia N97 isn't exactly a showstopper. It doesn't quite have the wow factor of the distinctive Palm Pre and like the T-Mobile G1 and HTC Touch Pro2, the N97 is a bit of a handful at 4.6 inches tall by 2.1 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick and 5.29 ounces. It also doesn't quite have the high-quality build of the Nokia E series and you are a bit weary of the flimsy battery cover, but overall, the smartphone has a solid construction and is a nice departure from the Nokia N95 and N96, especially with the addition of a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard. So dont mind!

Similar to the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, the Nokia N97 has a resistive touch screen that measures 3.5 inches diagonally and shows off 16.7 million colors at a 640x360-pixel resolution. While clear and bright, but it's not quite as sharp as the competitors, such as the HTC Touch Diamond2, and the built-in accelerometer has just a bit of a lag when switching from portrait to landscape mode or vice versa.Alas! The handset also features a proximity sensor so it will automatically turn off the display when you lift the smartphone to your ear for a phone call.

It's great to finally have a touch screen that can play up on all the capabilities of the N series, but we feel like Nokia didn't quite take full advantage of the situation.


The scrolling experience was also less smooth on the N97 since flicking your finger to go through long lists or pages results in jerky and short movements. In addition, like the Nokia 5800, you found that some menu items respond to a single tap, while others require double-taps. All that said, we do appreciate the new widget-based home screen on the Nokia N97. Similar to the Samsung TouchWiz interface found on the Omnia, this feature gives you the freedom to customize the N97's home screen and lets you see more information at a glance as well as have one-touch access to your apps.

You can have a maximum of eight widgets on the screen at one time, and it's easy to remove or rearrange them. By default, our review unit's home screen featured widgets for Facebook, AccuWeather, contacts, a shortcut bar to messages, the Web, maps, the media player, and more. There is a task manager that lets you see all your open apps and switch between them, but the multitasking capabilities are nowhere near as sophisticated as the Palm Pre's. However, we do prefer Nokia's interface over TouchWiz since it had better organization and didn't limit you to certain widgets.

You can personalize your phone with various themes, wallpaper, and more. For a full menu of apps and phone settings, just press the small button below the display that sits to the left of the touch-sensitive Talk and End keys. The simple grid menu system is easy enough to understand. It may not seem like a big deal but these minor annoyances add up and make a difference when comparing to the other touch-screen devices--iPhone, Pre, T-Mobile G1, Google Ion--on the market.

Like the HTC Touch Pro2, the Nokia N97 has a slider design with a tilting screen. One nice thing about the display is that it can be opened and viewed at a slight angle by simply pushing the screen to the right side, much like the AT&T Tilt and the HTC Touch Pro2. Nokia really did a nice job with the slider design, as the gliding motion is very smooth and does not have the harsh, abrupt feel the other two devices have.

The angled screen is not only good for viewing videos and apps but also messaging. However, the Nokia N97's QWERTY keyboard has been a hot topic of debate on the Web; most either hate it or love it. Individual buttons are a good size with enough spacing between them that mispresses were few. The keys also have a nonslippery texture and provide good, tactile feedback.


However, there are a couple of things that really put a damper on things. You should really liked the N97's QWERTY keyboard, except for the awkward placement of the space bar and shift key. For whatever reason, Nokia placed the space bar and shift key on the far right side . There's a directional keypad on the left side that takes up some room but even so, the space bar could have been placed more in the center like a regular keyboard. Instead, the location of the buttons completely threw us off and interrupted our flow. We got used to it eventually, but we still never felt 100 percent comfortable with the layout.Many people considered N97's QWERTY keyboard was one of the best ones on a smartphone.


If you need to enter a short amount of text, there is a soft keyboard that you can use instead of opening up the keyboard. You'll be doing a multitap dance with this option though since it's in alphanumeric format instead of a full QWERTY.

There are power button and 3.5mm headphone jack on top of the device.


On the left side there are a Micro-USB port, a lock switch, and the stereo speakers. The right side has a volume rocker that also doubles as zoom in/out buttons and a camera capture key. The camera is located on the back and both the lens and flash are protected by a sliding cover.

The Nokia N97 are packed with a travel charger, a Micro-USB cable, a wired headset, a stylus, a cleaning cloth, software CD, and reference material. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and help page.


Features

Nokia N97 is one feature-packed smartphone. It comes with huge 32GB of internal flash memory, which can be expanded to 48GB via the expansion slot!


Nokia also preloads the device with a number of extra apps, including a dedicated YouTube player, Qik which for sharing videos from your phone, Boingo Wi-Fi service, Psiloc World Traveler, AP News, and Guitar Rock Tour. The N97 also supports the recently launched Nokia Ovi Store where users can peruse the large catalog of Symbian apps and download them to the device, QuickOffice for viewing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, Adobe PDF, a file manager, and other PIM tools, such as a Zip manager, a calculator, a notepad, a measurement converter, a clock, and a voice recorder.



The Nokia N97 already offers 32GB of internal flash memory but you can expand storage even more via the microSD expansion slot on the back.
The N97 doesn't come with the new Nokia Messaging app like the Nokia E75, but no problem,there's still plenty of e-mail support. The smartphone can synchronize with Microsoft Exchange and it works with Lotus Notes, IMAP4, POP3, and SMTP accounts and comes with a hasfull attachment viewer. Unfortunately, there aren't any instant messaging clients on the phone, which is too bad when you are given the full QWERTY keyboard and all.


As a phone, the N97 offers quad-band world roaming, a speakerphone, speed dial, conference calling, voice-command support, a vibrate mode, and text and multimedia messaging obviously. The phone's address book is only limited by the available memory, and the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts. There's room in each entry for multiple phone numbers, work and home addresses, e-mail addresses, birthday, and more vitals. For caller ID purposes, you can edit each contact a photo, a group ID, or a custom ringtone. Bluetooth 2.0 is also onboard, with support for mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, hands-free kits, audio/video remote control, object push, dial-up networking, file transfer, and more. To get online, you can use either the phone's integrated Wi-Fi or tri-band HSDPA (850/1900/2100MHz).

Nokia's HTML Web browser is quite decent, offering various page views, keyword search, and Flash Lite 3.0 support, but navigation and zooming in/out of pages definitely feels clunkier than the iPhone and Pre, which benefit from a multitouch screen.

For navigating the streets, the Nokia N97 has standalone and assisted GPS, so it uses both satellites and cellular triangulation to find your position. The smartphone also comes preloaded with the Nokia Maps and has a built-in compass so the map will automatically orient itself to the direction you are headed to. For real-time, turn-by-turn voice-guided directions, you'll need to upgrade the application, but Nokia is now offering a complimentary three-month trial of the walk and drive turn-by-turn service. Afterward, you'll have several purchase options, which you can check out here.

The N97 features the same 5-megapixel camera as the Nokia N96.


The N97 keeps the same camera and the N96: a 5-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens with dual-L.E.D. flash, auto focus, and up to 4x digital zoom. There are numerous advanced camera options, such as color tone, light sensitivity, exposure, and geotagging. In addition, the camera can record MPEG-4 videos at a maximum VGA resolution (640x480) @ 30fps.

Picture quality are very impressive.Picture quality was crisp and clear. Objects were sharply defined in the image, and we were happy colors were vibrant and rich instead of washed out. Recorded videos looked better than other smartphones we've tested, though it was still slightly murky. Once done with your photos, you can add tags, save them as a contact image, share them with friends and family via multimedia message or e-mail. In addition, you can upload to a service like Flickr or Ovi.

As with Nokia's other N series devices, the N97 is also equipped with a built-in media player that supports MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, and eAAC+ files. The music library categorizes tracks by artists, albums, genres, and composers; you can also create playlists right on the phone and adjust the sound with the built-in equalizer. There's also support for Internet radio and an FM tuner. If you'd like to watch other videos, you can use RealPlayer to check out 3GPP and MPEG-4 files.


While all these features are great, the biggest downfall of the N97 might be the Symbian OS. The OS might have been passable when the smartphone was first announced in December 2008, but it feels completely outdated now, especially in light of the progress made with Google Android and the iPhone OS 3.0 and the introduction of Palm Web OS, and it's not optimized for a touch interface.

Performance
N97's call quality is excellent and it works in the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; tri-band HSDPA 850/1900/2100) in San Francisco. You enjoy clear audio on our end with good volume and very little to no background noise. But you didn't have quite the same quality for the speakerphone. Even at the highest level, volume was weak, we had to hold the speaker close to our ear to hear your friends, and our callers said we also sounded soft. In addition, audio would occasionally cut out. Given that the speakerphone didn't produce the best results, you weren't surprised when songs sounded soft and hollow when played through the speakers. Fortunately, the N97 is equipped with a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack so we were able to plug in our Bose On-Ear Headphones and enjoy better sound quality.

The smartphone's GPS capabilities were decent. From a cold start, it took the N97 about 10 minutes to find out your location when subsequent starts were much faster, taking less then 2 minutes. And Using Nokia Maps, it was able to track closely your movements and provided accurate directions.
The Nokia N97 comes with a 1500mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 95 hours (GSM)/6 hours (3G) and up to 17.9 days (GSM)/16.6 days (3G) of standby time.

Nokia N97’s Key features are-
• Slide-n-tilt 3.5" 16M-color resistive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution also having Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
• 5 MP autofocus camera with dual-L.E.D. flash and lens cover
VGA 30 fpsvideo recording
• Symbian OS 9.4 with S60 5th edition UI
• Slide-out three-row full QWERTY keyboard
• ARM 11 434MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM
• Quad-band GSM support and 3G with HSDPA support
• Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS
3 months of free voice-guided navigation via Ovi Maps)
• Class-leading 32GB onboard storage
• microSD card slot with microSDHC support
• Built-in accelerometer
• 3.5 mm audio jack
• TV out
• Stereo FM Radio with RDS, FM transmitter
• microUSB port and stereo Bluetooth v2.0
• Web browser has full Flash and Java support
• Nice audio reproduction quality
• Digital compass


Main disadvantages
• The S60 5th edition UI still has poor ergonomics and is not as thumbable as we expected
• Camera features are not so advanced
• No DivX or XviD support out-of-the-box
• No smart dialing option
• Limited 3rd party software availability
• No office document editing (without a paid upgrade) !How Funny!!!