Nokia N97

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39030107,49300332,00.htm

Reviewed 8 June 2009

Reviewed by Flora Graham

Nokia fans who can count are at fever pitch over the upcoming launch of the N97, the successor to N-series heavyweights the N95 and N96. With a touchscreen and slide-out Qwerty keypad, the N97 takes a shot at its rivals in a bid to be the capo di tutti capi when it comes to smart phones. But, while we love the raw power of the N97 and its great keyboard, it doesn't quite fulfil our Qwerty-themed dreams.

The N97 is available from free on a £40-per-month contract with Orange.

Body and soul
At 15.9mm thick, the N97 isn't the sveltest phone out there, and the physique of the black version that we review here didn't attract many oohs and aahs. It's rather lumpen, and doesn't have the compact, solid class of some of Nokia's E-series phones. But, except for the flimsy plastic battery cover, it feels solidly made, improving on the rickety N95, and the Qwerty keyboard pops open with satisfying gusto.

Deploying the slide-out keyboard forces the N97 into landscape mode

The N97 is slightly different to a standard slider phone, like the E75, because the screen slides out at a slight angle. That angle means you don't need a stand to watch videos with the phone sitting on a table, and it's also useful when you're typing. It's a good innovation from Nokia, and the hinge feels like it will stand up to some enthusiastic use.

The keyboard is another area where the N97 shines. It has small, 5.5 by 6.5mm buttons that are almost flat, but they have a decent 1mm of space between them and click satisfyingly when pressed, so they're easy to use. Beware long numbers, though. Since the numbers run along the top row of buttons, you have to press shift each time you want to type one, doubling your work. Sometimes it's faster to switch to the portrait view and use the on-screen number keypad, which works well.

With the keyboard stowed away, the N97 goes into portrait mode

The N97's touchscreen interface feels snappy and responsive, but we wish that Nokia had switched from the resistive touchscreen it used with the 5800 XpressMusic to a capacitive one, like the iPhone's. You have to apply pressure to a resistive display for it to register what you're doing, and it helps to use a sharp point, like a fingernail. We prefer capacitive screens because they feel harder, are brighter, and we can use them even after we've chewed our nails to the quick during an episode of Deal or No Deal. Nokia has included a stylus in the box, but that's not a good sign for what's intended to be a crowd-leading touchscreen handset.

Get yourself connected
Nokia is pitching the N97, which packs speedy 3.6Mbps HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity, as a handset for Web-obsessed users for whom a minute away from the Internet is like a minute without oxygen. We had no trouble staying connected via Wi-Fi and 3G, and we appreciated the feature that automatically showed us the sign-in screen for the open wireless network at our secret CNET UK base. On other phones, we have to remember to launch a browser to view the page before we can start using the connection.

We also liked the Flash support that allowed us to watch videos easily on the Web, but we really missed multitouch zoom. Web pages are full of tiny links that desperately need zooming, and that's a multi-tap process with the N97.

When surfing in full-screen mode, first you have to bring up the menu, then click the zoom icon, then tap or drag a slider to zoom in or out. You can't centre on a particular point, like you can with gesture-based zoom, and the menu partially obscures the page, so it takes some guesswork to decide when you've zoomed enough.

Touching the void
The convoluted zoom menu highlights usability issues throughout the N97's user interface. It's improved a great deal since we saw the interface on a pre-production model, and it feels much more responsive and finger-friendly, but there are still a few things that keep it from being fingertip heaven.

The N97 is fairly wide

For example, when looking at a long list of music tracks, you can scroll up and down easily with a finger, but it's a slow process. There's no flicking up and down with abandon, like with the iPhone, and no animations or behaviours to give the interface a feeling of responsiveness and liveliness.

In fact, the user interface is dull throughout, and it suffers from a lack of a touchscreen-focused graphic design. We would have blamed the Symbian S60 operating system, which has been grafted onto a touchscreen interface, but we happen to be testing the new Samsung i8910 HD -- formerly known as the Omnia HD -- which uses the same Symbian OS to power a touchscreen interface. It has many of the same drawbacks, such as lack of multitouch capability, but its bright, luscious icons encourage you to start tapping, and built-in applications such as the music player are much more modern-looking.

The in-browser zoom menu is too convoluted for our tastes. We'd prefer to see multitouch zoom

One irritating quirk that both phones share is that, in some menus, you have to tap twice to open an option. For example, in the music menu, you tap once to select a song and then tap again to play it. It's double the work for our lazy fingers and it makes the interface feel sluggish and confusing.

Home is where the widget is
The homescreen does a much better job of showing what can be done. It can show six customisable widgets, including ones for live news feeds and Facebook updates. There are also groups of application shortcuts and a little version of the music player, so you can play, pause and skip tracks from the homescreen.

We like that the position and content of the widgets can be changed, but all those options mean the interface isn't as intuitive as that of some other phones. For example, the widgets can be dragged around with a finger, but only after navigating a couple of levels of menu options. Unfortunately, we also found the widgets rather buggy. A few times our Facebook and weather widgets were squished up into a corner, although they did right themselves after a restart.

The N97 can be used with the Ovi Store, Nokia's answer to the Apple App Store. There's still not a huge amount of content on there, considering how many great apps exist for Symbian, but, once it's found its feet, Ovi Store should become a good source for getting more apps for your phone. We found downloading paid and free apps to be a fairly painless process, and a big improvement on how hard it used to be to get apps onto your Symbian phone.

Push the button
The N97 has a 5-megapixel camera with a sliding lens cover and a dual-LED photo light. Photos' colours are slightly washed out, but, on the plus side, there's hardly any shutter lag, with only a moment's delay between pressing the dedicated camera button and snapping a photo. We had no trouble storing our snaps, since the N97 sports an eye-watering 32GB of on-board memory. There's also a microSD memory card slot, so you can pack in another 16GB for an elephant-sized total of 48GB of memory.

But, for viewing photos and videos, the N97's 89mm (3.5-inch) screen isn't as bright or sharp as some of its competitors' displays. We felt this especially keenly when we had the Samsung i8910 HD on our desks blowing our minds with its AMOLED display.

The N97 uses an accelerometer to switch between portrait and landscape orientation, although this feature was turned off on our phone by default. The screen orientation will also switch based on the keyboard's position. Sliding out the keyboard kicks you into landscape mode, and stowing the keyboard away bumps you into portrait mode. 

Nokia PC Suite, the desktop syncing software, did an okay job of converting and transferring our test videos. It managed to convert our MP4, WMV and AVI test files into adequate-looking videos that were easy to find on the handset, but they weren't the right aspect ratio for the N97's wide screen. Be sure to update to the latest version of PC Suite, because it's still very much a work in progress and each update tends to be a major leap forward.

Syncing calendar entries and other tasks, like backing up the phone's contents, tend to work well with PC Suite, but you're out of luck if you have a Mac: it requires a PC. Syncing is speedy over the included micro-USB cable, and we were thrilled to see that this phone also charges while syncing -- a great feature that's missing from some Nokia handsets.

The N97 has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack on the top, so you can use your own headphones.

Hit the road
The E75 also features Nokia Maps, with turn-by-turn navigation for walking and driving. It brought up fast, accurate maps for us in central London. Our N97 came with a free 30-day subscription -- after that, you'll have to pay for the navigation features.

It's no surprise that battery life is poor on a phone that runs power-hungry features simultaneously, and our N97 didn't even make it through a full day of testing. There was also one occasion when memory ran low and we had to close some applications.

Conclusion
The Nokia N97 is a feature-packed heavyweight that went back to smart phone school and came out with a PhD in power. We like its angled screen, excellent Qwerty keyboard, customisable homescreen, and deep well of features. But we think the resistive touchscreen is already old-fashioned, and the user interface is bland, with some niggling irritations and bugs, although you might like its familiar feel if you're already a Nokia fan.

With the iPhone, the HTC Magic and the Palm Pre taking touchscreen phones to a higher level, the N97 is up against stiff competition. Its touchscreen talents can't measure up to theirs, but it could be the right choice for avid typists, Nokia lovers and those who want to take advantage of the wealth of Symbian apps out there.

Edited by Charles Kloet