Nokia N97

It’s not an iPhone killer. It’s not even a killer Nokia phone. The company’s flagship N97 is a high-end device that’s designed to excel at both productivity and multimedia. Unlike other new top-of-the-line smart phones, however, the Nokia N97 is an unlocked device, which means that you’ll have to bring your own AT&T or T-Mobile SIM card to a phone that costs a whopping $699. Is the premium worth it? While we like the widget-based home screen, 5-megapixel camera, and GPS functionality (once the phone finds you), the N97 frustrates with its awkward keyboard, lackluster app store, and overall bugginess. The N97 might get better with some updates, but even then it won’t be as compelling as such devices as the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre.
Design
The Nokia N97 has a large 3.5-inch, 640 x 360-pixel resolution resistive touchscreen that dominates the phone’s face. Its display is flanked by touch-sensitive Send/End keys that lay flush with the screen’s surface, as well as a chrome Main Menu key. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard helps the N97 stand out against other N-series devices, which typically sport alphanumeric keypads. Overall the phone feels somewhat bulky at 4.6 x 2.2 x 0.6 inches and 5.3 ounces.
The N97 has a chrome border around its entire face, and a matte black (or white on the white model) battery cover that has a small lip at the bottom for easy gripping. We’re surprised that a $699 phone has such a cheap-feeling plastic back cover, especially considering that $99 devices such as the Nokia E71x have metal ones. Its 5-MP autofocus camera has an embedded flash, and a slide-down lens cover.
On the left side of the phone is a lock toggle switch, a mini-USB port, and two tiny speakers. On the top of the phone is a power switch as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack. The volume keys and a camera quick-launch button are on the right side of the device.
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Keyboard
The N97 has an awkwardly designed 3-line QWERTY keyboard. The good news is that the sliding function of the hinge feels very solid, and it tilts the screen up at about a 35-degree angle for easy viewing. However, we would have liked to have been able to adjust the angle a little, as you can on the HTC Touch Pro2. Worse, the spacebar is placed off to the right of the keyboard, which takes some getting used to, especially when most smart phones put it in the center of the keyboard.\
The backlit rubber keys provided very little feedback, but are soft and easy to press. An on-screen alphanumeric keyboard lets you type in numbers or quick texts without having to open the phone, and both keyboards worked well. A five-way multidirectional keypad to the left of the keyboard lets you navigate through menus.
User Interface and Widgets
The Nokia N97 runs the touch-enabled Symbian S60 5th Edition operating system, but the experience feels years behind the interfaces found on the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. Although you can multitask by leaving multiple applications open at once, there isn’t a quick-and-easy way to open those apps again as you would with the Palm Pre’s card–based user interface. While responsive, the N97’s resistive touchscreen wasn’t as accurate or as sensitive as the capacitive touchscreens on the iPhone, the Pre, and the T-Mobile G1. Some menu presses were never recognized, and you don’t have the added benefit of zooming into Web pages by pinching the screen; the N97 requires a double tap to zoom.
You can access the phone’s main menu by pressing the chrome menu button at any time. Inside the menu, you’ll find the typical offerings: your applications folder, calendar, contacts, games, maps, music, the Ovi Store, settings, and more.
To take advantage of touch, Nokia has added widgets to the home screen, which will display as many as six widgets at a time. Twelve widgets are preloaded on the phone (with more available through the Ovi Store), including Amazon, AP News, and shortcuts for your favorite contacts. If you choose to display your favorite contacts, you can place as many as eight of them on the home screen, each represented by a thumbnail image. If you click a widget, such as AP News or Facebook, for example, it launches the full application. The AP app provides full news stories, images, and current-event videos. The Facebook application shows your buddies’ latest updates, and lets you upload pictures.
You can view your Facebook status updates in real time, watch live news stream across the widget bar, or upload pictures to social networks such as Flickr, Ovi, and Vox right from the home screen. There isn’t a Twitter widget yet, but we’d love to see the Gravity Twitter client make one available soon. We’d also love the ability to customize the widgets more, such as forcing the AP to show only tech news, for example.
While the widgets look cool, their performance was mediocre at best. Our test unit was marred by crashes that required reboots to refresh the content. Fragments of the home screen remained, for example, occasionally when we launched widgets into their full respective applications. We were able to remedy this by returning to the home screen and relaunching the widget. Also, some widgets got stuck on the loading stage until we launched the full app and then returned to the home screen.
During our testing, we had two instances where we turned the phone on and waited several minutes for our home screen content to load. At one point, the N97 became completely unusable as a result of software failure. The only way to fix the problem was to bring up the keypad and run a hard reset by typing *#7370#.