Nokia N97
March 23, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
The Nokia N97 is a nicely designed phone. The design is agreeable to look at, and the build quality is good, except maybe for the battery cover which has a plastic feel – but it needs to be flexible because it’s *removable*. The display is a mixed bag: it has a resolution of 640×360 but the colors seem a little faded and the clarity seems inferior to other touch phones. I suspect that one of the display layers has something to do with this. Two people that I’ve shown the phone to immediately made the same remark as well.
Next to the speaker, you will notice a front-facing camera and a proximity sensor. The 5 Megapixel camera is in the back, protected by a sliding lens cover. There’s a “camera” button that makes taking picture more natural than taping on the screen (which often induces a last minute shake that could makes photos blurry). The keyboard sliding mechanism feels solid.
The Nokia N97 is a little thick (15.9mm). The bottom part is basically as thick as my Blackberry curve or an iPhone, and the display is 3mm (or so) thick on top of it. These 3mm represent what it takes to add a physical keyboard to a phone like that. The T-Mobile G1 is even thicker at 16.35mm. If you want a big display and a full keyboard that’s the price to pay right now.
Touch Phone (Just OK)
For many things (but not all), the Nokia N97 can be used as a pure touch phone. The company has done an “ok job” on the tactile user interface. It’s mostly intuitive, except for the setup menus (I question their logic). Nokia uses a double-tap system to avoid accidental clicks vs. drag interpretations (see video). For example, in the menu, if I want to go to my contacts, I need to click once to select “contacts”, then click a second time to actually launch the application. Depending on your tastes this can be great or annoying. We’re not fans of it, but I got over it.
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.
The N97 comes loaded with Nokia Maps, and I can say that it is my best “out of the box” experience with a default navigation app. Unlike Google maps, the Nokia maps are cached on the device itself, so once they are onboard, they are not downloaded (over the air) again. Better yet: you can pre-load an entire city, country or the whole world (4GB) so that Nokia maps doesn’t load the maps while you’re traveling. That cuts down on roaming charges, waiting time and frustration.
Nokia Maps is fast and lets you scroll the map smoothly. Upon a zoom in/out it will take a second readjust the level of details (see video). I found the compass be not very useful in pedestrian mode. Using it makes the map rotate left and right -all the time- which doesn’t help the overall map readability. Nokia should also improve the search and use a single text field like Google Maps does. It is also not possible to select an origin/destination directly on the map. That would be easy to add.
The Nokia N97 has a good browser, it worked with pretty much all the sites that went to, including Yahoo Finance and Google Docs. Y! Finance is usually an interesting site to try on a phone because it’s hard to render on small displays. The N97′s resolution is high enough to display it correctly, so that’s a win. It is possible to log into Google Docs and view text documents, but sheets did not work, even in read-only mode. Adobe Flash Lite is supported. You can go on YouTube, follow links to YouTube and do things that you would normally do on a computer, without going through a YouTube “app”.
