Hi, I am a 21 year old guy from Gloucester, England. I enjoy Sports, especially football, music, fa...
Hi, I am a 21 year old guy from Gloucester, England. I enjoy Sports, especially football, music, fashion, travel and gadgets. I am currently training to become a firefighter and also make music in my spare time.
Member since:24.05.2003
Reviews:8
I have just recieved my White Nokia N97 and must say I am delighted with it. The design is simple and understated with the minimum number of function keys on the main body. This is intentional, as it encourages you to utilise the 3.5-inch touchscreen display. The first thing I noticed about the screen is how bright it is. Sure, critics have moaned that it’s not 'amoled' but images looks sharp and the 640 × 360-pixel screen looks great.
Handling the N97 for the first time I was impressed with the build quality. The phone felt very rugged/sturdy and although quite a tall device it sat nicely in the hand. The menu, camera and volume buttons are made of metal and are all raised from the plastic casing making using them a pleasure. The send and end keys are both touch sensitive and very responsive. Where the N97 really excels is when the sliding QWERTY keyboard is opened. The sliding movement is smooth
and feels effortless. Once open the screen is automatically tilted at an angle. Although a nice touch I personally would prefer the option of altering the degree of the tilt like on the Touch Pro2. The mechanics of the slide are fantastic though!
One very handy addition to the Nokia N97 that wasn’t present on the 5800 XpressMusic is the proximity sensor. A big issue with touchscreen handsets is that when you’re talking on the phone, it’s all too easy to trigger up an unwanted application when you’re chatting away on the phone. The proximity sensor switches the screen off so you can’t accidentally start the music player or any other app while you’re on the phone.
Widgets are popular these days. Samsung and Sony Ericsson (Xperia) are big believers of Widgets, but the N97 has the best homepage widgets implementation that I have seen so far. On many phones, widgets are messy (like the OMNIA), but Nokia has done a good job at maximizing the use of screen space. I like the default homepage that includes Facebook, but I noticed that the widget was often out of sync with the real-time content (this is true for Exchange as well).
The N97 has a lot of email options and the one that I prefer for work is Exchange: it is well implemented and works flawlessly. Emails arrive instantly and the only thing that I noticed is that upon a soft reset (battery removal), the phone does not cache the Exchange email and spends time doing a "sync" from scratch (that can take a couple of minutes).
I also setup a GMail account. From the @gmail.com address, the N97 was able to preset all the mail server settings. All that I had to provide is my email and password. By default, that email was setup to use the 3.5G connection, so you might want to set it up with the "default" connection, to make it work over WIFI as well. All in all, the setup couldn't be much easier.
Ovi Store is a very basic implementation of an app store. The bottom-line is that there's nothing very exciting about it and most of the coolest application are already embedded in the N97 (my own preferences here, obviously). Browsing the store is a bit tedious and slow, I guess that I would rather browse apps on a PC and download something from there. "Existence" is often superior to "perfection", but I hope that Nokia will improve the store soon.
It won't come as a surprise that Nokia has a good 5 Megapixel camera. Of course, Megapixels don't mean much in terms of quality, but in my experience this is "good" to "very good".
So, in conclusion, Nokia is playing catch up in a market that has become extremely competitive in the past couple of years. In that game and at that price, there's only one thing that really counts: the user experience. The Nokia N97 is not a "bad" phone and it doesn't deserve the some of the harsh reviews that I've seen recently. In fact, it has good hardware, great storage, and nice design. It is also better than the Sony Ericsson Xperia. I would definatly reccomend this phone if you are looking for an alternative to the I-Phone. The pricing however, is way too steep .
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Jul 10th, 2009
very helpful by (40%):
helpful by (20%):
not helpful by (40%):
