I’ve been using my Nokia N97 for about two months and after the initial excitement about the phone’s release, I feel compelled to give my thoughts about the device so far. I had very high expectations for the phone, so much so that I held back on upgrading my old Nokia E61 for 6 months until the phone finally came out in the UK. And who wouldn’t; with specs like 32GB of phone memory, a 5 mega-pixel Carl Zeiss camera with flash and the ultimate combination of  touch-screen and QWERTY keyboard as just some of the highlights.

Perhaps it was thesame high expectations that has left me quite underwhelmed with the phone today. I’m however beginning to ‘accept’ it more compared to the first few days I had with it. It must be said that high expectations or not, I saw early signs that the N97 would fail to deliver the hype associated with it. I read many reviews on various blogs and websites such as Engadget with disatisfied early testers of the device. Even Stephen Fry, whose opinions on technology I hold very highly, was not at all impressed. That didn’t keep me away though, and I eventually got the phone on an 18-month contract. Now when you sign an 18-month contract for £55 every month (including insurance), you would naturally expect that the device will meet all expectations when you take it out and first use it. The Nokia N97 did not as I seemed to encounter one problem or the other. The N97’s problems mostly seem to reside with the software and the capabilities of the Symbian s60 v5 operating system it uses. Very obvious issues are performance and menu inconsistencies. Personally, the most annoying for me are:

1. The phone often crashes after a coversation. It’s difficult to say what causes this as it happens only with some calls but I noticed it almost certainly happens when you “unlock” the phone just before answering.
2. Still on the issue of calls, there is always a notifcation about the status of packet data just before a call connection is made. Hardly a major issue, but it is extremely annoying when the notification obstructs one from switching to speaker phone. The “beep” sound it makes when the notification pops up is also something we can do without.
3. Despite the enormous 32GB of memory, Nokia have for some strange reason reserved only about 70MB internal memory. What this means is that the phone quickly runs out of space on drive C: as this is where most apps are installed and save files to the C: drive, adding new apps becomes a pain.
4. There are numerous performance issues and general lack of intuitiveness. For example, it takes about 4 seconds to switch orientation when the phone is tilted from potrait to landscape (or vice versa). The phone user gets a black screen during that time which gives the impression that something has gone wrong.
5. The physical QWERTY keyboard is brilliantly designed, but the actual keys are too shallow and don’t ‘travel’ when pressed. This is another usability issue that could be considered minor, but it is certainly not helpful for people used to better phone keys like the ones found on BlackBerry devices.

It’s not all irritating with the N97 though, as there are many things it does very well. The best thing I like about the phone is almost certainly the brilliant form factor. it’s truly a beautiful phone to look at and feels solid even with the slide out mechanism. Also, the 5 mega-pixel camera is an absolute dream to use. Still picture quality is the best I’ve seen for a phone and the fact that it does video in 16:9 DVD quality makes it one hell of a multimedia tool. There also very nice overall touches such as the new USB port that also doubles as a charging port and the 3.5mm headphone jack. The browser is enjoyable to use, especially on the spacious widescreen.

Picture taken with the N97 at the Emirates stadium

Probably the best thing about the phone is the frequent software updates that Nokia push out every now and then. So far, I have updated the firmware twice since purchase and I can say that stability has improved everytime. There’s even more good news coming out of Nokia World conference Stuttgart that there will be a major firmware update in October which will introduce full kinetic scrolling and larger internal memory.

It’s safe to say then that even though the Nokia N97 hasn’t impressed me as much as I thought it would, I won’t be swapping or dropping it anytime soon. Infact, I’m quite liking and making the most of it.

Tags: mobile, n97, nokia, phone, review, technology, updates