Available in Black or White, the N97 is more a mobile computer than a mobile phone. Packed with every imaginable feature, Nokia's designers have succeeded in creating a device that is supremely powerful yet easy to use, with a user-friendly touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. With music, video, photos, email, web and downloadable apps all easily accessible from the customisable home page, the N97 delivers everything that we could ask for on the move. Big, heavy and expensive, but just about worth it!
The N97 is much more than an enhanced N96 - it has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen display. Other features include a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, GPS, WiFi and 32GB memory. Nokia claim that it is the "most powerful, multi-sensory mobile computer in existence". Throw away your laptops, guys, the N97 is here!
There are so many touchscreen phones on the market these days, it's tempting to think that they are all the same. But the Nokia N97 does offer more than most. Nokia seem to be positioning the N97 less like a mobile phone and more like a handheld computer. Although at Mobile Phones UK, we tend to be sceptical about a lot of stuff, we're actually genuinely impressed by the N97 design concept. The N97 has both a touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard makes typing fast and easy, and we definitely prefer this to a virtual keyboard (although it isn't the best keyboard ever - it's too wide for comfort, and the space key is in the wrong place.) Whether it's texting, e-mailing or writing notes, the QWERTY keyboard makes things possible that we simply wouldn't have bothered to attempt on an old-style mobile. But it's the touchscreen that will demand most of your attention. The screen measures 3.5 inches across, which makes it the same as the
Apple iPhone 3G S, but it has a higher resolution than the iPhone, at a massive 640 x 360 pixels. With this resolution, there are almost as many pixels on this pocket-sized device as there were on early personal computers. And that makes it possible to start thinking about the N97 as if it were a handheld PC, which is exactly what the engineers at Nokia have done. The touchscreen is of resistive type, similar to the
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, not quite up to iPhone standards, but pretty slick nonetheless. It's not quite as responsive as the best of the best, and the menus are sometimes slow to respond - typical of previous Nseries phones. The biggest problem is that the user interface feels like it's Symbian with touchscreen functionality bolted on - which is exactly what it is - rather than a native touchscreen OS such as Android, Windows Mobile or Apple's OS X.
The home screen of the phone is information-packed and fully customisable. You can simultaneously view the date & time, your inbox, the weather forecast, RSS feeds, Facebook and quick links to your favourite web pages. This is similar to Samsung's widget interface appearing on phones like the
Samsung Jet and the
i8910 HD. Touch a web icon and web pages open up in their full glory, with easy touch controls to scroll and zoom. There's full support for Flash videos as well. It's the mobile internet as it should be, and once you've experienced it you won't want to go back to how things used to be. The internet is fast too, either using the 3G HSDPA connection, and even faster is the WiFi connection, where it's available.
The N97 has a built-in GPS receiver, and you can use this to find your location, to geo-tag photos and to navigate. Nokia Maps is supplied, plus multimedia city guides and there's a built-in compass feature too. A 3-month trial licence for pedestrian and voice-guided drive navigation software is included.
The N97 has plenty of custom apps available too. Built on the mature Symbian operating system, there are plenty of apps that will be suitable for the N97, and you can download applications, games, videos and content through Nokia's Ovi store.
Nokia haven't taken this opportunity to upgrade their camera though. It's the same old 5 megapixel camera that appeared in the
Nokia N96. But that's not a complaint - the camera is a good one, with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and a dual LED flash.
The N97 really is a feature-packed phone. It's much more like a laptop in terms of its capabilities. We're not going to list everything that it does, because the list would be too long! See the detailed spec below for further info. Suffice to say that it can handle pretty much any kind of media and communications that you can think of. With its close integration with the internet, it feels very much like the 21st century has arrived. We just want to mention the enormous 32GB of onboard memory, plus the ability to increase this with a 16GB memory card.
Nokia's battery life figures are very impressive when you consider what this device is capable of. With 6 hours of talktime on a 3G network and up to 430 minutes of standby, this is as much as we could have hoped for. We don't yet have any real world data on this, but hopefully our user reviews below will help to clarify this.
Finally, we have to comment on the size of the device. Yes, it's big, but what did you expect? It's heavy too, but there's a lot of stuff inside! This is a phone that does its best to pack in every feature that users might want, and we think that it's succeeded. Is it the best phone ever? It's probably Nokia's best phone, but at its heart the Symbian operating system feels just a little dated compared to the slickness and speed of the
iPhone, or the power of Windows Mobile phones such as the
HTC Touch HD or
Samsung Omnia. We would definitely recommend the N97 for Nokia fans looking for an upgrade, but fans of other smartphone operating systems will probably prefer to stick to what they know.
How to rate the N97? Although it isn't perfect in every way, no phone that we've reviewed ever has been. It would be mean not to award 5 stars for such an amazing phone. The truth is that we give it 4.5 stars.
Features of the Nokia N97 include:
S60 5th edition Symbian interface
5 megapixel camera (2592 x 1944 pixels) with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, dual LED flash, 4x digital zoom and geo-tagging
Video camera: MPEG4/3GP VGA video capture at 640 x 480 pixels and 30 frames/second, 4x digital zoom and video light
Front camera for video calling: 176 x 144 pixels
Display: Resistive touchscreen, 16 million colours, 640 x 360 pixels (3.5 inches) with orientation sensor, proximity sensor and light sensor
Live TV (DVB-H based mobile TV with internal antenna)
Digital music player (supports MP3/AAC/eAAC/eAAC+/WMA formats) with playlists and equalizer
Stereo FM radio RDS with Visual Radio support
FM transmitter
Built-in GPS navigation with Nokia Maps application and digital compass
Speaker independent name dialing
Voice commands
Voice recorder
Integrated hands-free speaker
Speed dialing
Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email (SMTP, IMAP4, POP3, Mail for Exchange)
Viewing of email attachments – .doc, .xls, .ppt, .pdf
Java games (Guitar Rock Tour included)
Advanced contacts database with support for multiple phone and e-mail details per entry
Memory: 32 GB plus microSD memory card slot (up to 16GB)
Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, USB 2.0, TV-Out, (WLAN 802.11 b/g), 3.5 mm stereo headphone plug
Internet: Full web browser with Flash video support, RSS reader, WAP, GPRS class A, WCDMA/HSDPA (3.6Mb/s download), WLAN (up to 11Mbps/54Mbps)
Quadband plus 3G
Size: 117 x 55 x 18 mm
Weight: 150g
Talktime: 360 minutes (3G) - 570 minutes (2G)
Battery standby: 430 hours
