Opinions: Nokia N97 Heaven?

I had a strange feeling that my contract with 3 was coming up for renewal – almost like a sixth sense. So I phoned up and would you believe it, I had only a month left. I was on the phone for a fair amount of time with the sales chap and managed to strike a pretty good deal. 3 offer a 25% journalist discount – so this, tied in with my bartering bought me an N97, unlimited internet and 750 minutes with 225 text messages all for £29pcm.

I hadn't actually used the N97 by this point as I skipped the launch (although apparently there were no devices there anyway), but I took the gamble as I've been quite happy with my N95 – but wanted a QWERTY keyboard and better web browser – so chances were I'd get this. Besides, if I didn't like it, I could sell it on...

The build quality is excellent and the way the keyboard hinge works is some top notch engineering. When closed it sits flush and the shape of the device fits nicely in your hand. They have removed the music playback buttons, which I didn't use anyway (although you can use the inline remote) and the headphone jack is on the top of the device, much like the N96. The faux metal trim around the edge concerns me, as this is plastic. Judging by my N95 – this will rub off in time.

The camera is really good – with a Carl Zeiss lens and a 5MP sensor. If you go to the camera mode with the lens protector still on, it automatically uses the camera on the front – great for self portraits. However, I don't like the lens protector itself – I can feel it with my finger when I'm using the keyboard, but I keep thinking it's open as it feels the same when it's open as when it's closed – you can feel a smooth recessed area.

I had lots of problems with my N95 if I wanted to plug it in via USB to put new music on. Any applications that were loaded from the flash memory had to be shut down – which meant closing down pretty much everything (Shozu, Skype etc.). Thankfully, this issue has been addressed.

I stuck in an 8GB microSD card and plugged in the USB cable. Straight away Ubuntu mounted the internal 32GB of memory and the 8GB MicroSD. Using 'dd' for direct byte copying, I found speeds a little on the slow side – about 3.5MB/s. Real world copying of MP3s gave a pretty consistent 2.7MB/s - still better than the 800k/sec I got from my N95, but a lot slower than even the slowest of flash drives.

The big plus point (and one of the key reasons I stick to Nokia) is that it is simply a Mass Storage Device. I can copy all my music over and then simply re-scan the device for new tracks. I don't have to have an specific software to upload music (*cough* iTunes *cough*) and in pretty much every respect my phone is entirely separate from my computer.

Although Nokia has moved to the MicroUSB, which frankly annoys me when MiniUSB was doing just fine, it does at least charge over USB – which I'm very thankful of.

A nice addition that was I wasn't expecting was the FM transmitter. This is especially useful as my car doesn't have a line in. It allows you to pick what frequency you like and you simply tune to it. It's well integrated into the music player too, although accessible as a separate application. It uses RDS to transmit “Nokia” as the station name, which is good, I suppose – but why doesn't it transmit the name of the track? Surely that's more useful?

I really like the keyboard – I can type pretty quickly on it and it's perfect for dual thumb use. People have complained that the space bar is on the right hand side – this is actually a really comfortable place for it to be. All is not well though. There is only one shift key – on the left hand side. So what happens when you want to do a capital A? You have to stretch your thumb all the way over to meet. Very annoying. Equally, there is only one symbol key, so to do an apostrophe (which I do a lot of) you have perform a similar manoeuvre and this really slows down your typing.

However, I imagine I will get used to this – what annoys me is the software. It tries to be clever by automatically capitalising the beginning of the sentence. However, if you press shift to do a capital letter for the beginning of the sentence, it then does the opposite and gives you a lower case letter. But this behaviour isn't consistent – when inputting text using the web browser for instance, it doesn't bother – it seems you are doomed to have sentences beginning with a lower case letter.

Despite obviously trying to be clever – it isn't clever enough to automatically capitalise an “I” mid-sentence. It either needs to do nothing, or it needs to have some smart predictive system like the iPhone uses.

From a technology stand point, there are phones with much better screens. However something else being better doesn't make this bad – you certainly don't look at it and go “OMG – how can you look at that?” like you would with a passive matrix LCD, but if you get it at the right angle you can see a grid that is involved in the touch screen technology and it's a little annoying. Being resistive touch, it's not perfect – especially when dragging items around or using a fiddly scroll bar – but it's not bad either. Most people will use the keyboard for typing, so it functions enough for the way the OS has been designed – clicking primarily large icons.

The biggest problem for me, was using it in the car. I used my N95 for Google Maps use and using the d-pad it was fairly easy to simply tell it to retry the connection when it dropped out of 3G signal. However, trying to do this on a touch screen in a moving vehicle was nigh on impossible. Secondly, the unlock button is on the left hand side of the device – so when clamped in my generic mobile phone cage, I could no longer get to it. So if the screen locked, I had no option but to remove it from the mount. This makes it a little useless when it comes to music playback too.

The operating system itself is very similar to the N95 – it is after all, still S60. I really like the home screen, as I've tailor made this with shortcuts to my most commonly used applications - and being S60 I've been able to download all the software I used to use very quickly.

The web browser is a dramatic improvement – with rendering that rivals a desktop browser. But I was disappointed to see that the zoom only goes as advanced as a double tap for 200%. Nokia should have swallowed their pride and simply copied the Apple system of snapping to a block of the web page or using something similar to the two-fingered zoom.

The e-mail client is also improved and using the 3 Push Mail application I was quickly setup to my Google Apps account without needed to know any details other than my login credentials. The downside is that they have gone for a single line approach for the sender and subject, so you get a very small amount of detail about the e-mail. SMS on the other hand gets one line for the sender and another line with the beginning of the SMS, which is much preferred. Unfortunately, there is no way of configuring this.

Rendering of the e-mails itself is improved – especially when it comes to being sent links, but there is no ability to adjust the text size as I found it a little big.

Copy and paste is practically non-existent, which is disappointing when the N95 had its own dedicated button.

Conclusion

There are many things about the N97 that I like, but there are some things about it that were implemented better on the N95. The inability to use it in-car is certainly something that is almost a deal-breaker for me.

The hardware itself is really quite good, but the software just isn't good enough – especially when you consider how long we've been waiting. You still get slow downs and hangs that you expect with S60 and Ovi is frankly a PITA.

There is nothing on this phone that couldn't have been done several years ago and I find that upsetting. I expected more. Given the opportunity, I'd throw Android on this and be done with it.

However, one thing Nokia is doing better than anyone else, is making the phone independent of your computer and your choice of OS. It's recognised as a Mass Storage Device, so I can upload music and videos without ever needing to install any software. Using cloud based synchronisation I can sync my contacts and calendar too. If the iPhone had the same stand alone functionality – it would have won me over a long time ago.

Is it a bad phone? No. Do I have many other choices whilst on 3? Apart from the E71... no. Will I be selling it and buying an unlocked second hand G1? We'll see.

If you had the space bar in the middle, you'd be stretching your thumb into the middle on a regular basis. As it is, it's in the most relaxed position your thumb could be. I got used to it very quickly indeed. And the screen is not appalling - it's just not as good as other phones. Just because something isn't the best, doesn't make it bad. Appalling suggests it's not fit for the purpose (like the PocketSurfer...).

I wasn't suggesting no other devices have cloud based solutions - but there's no point having some, you need them all. If I bought an iPhone right now, as a Linux user, I wouldn't be able to add any music or videos. I just don't see why it should be dependent on me running Windows/Mac to get such a simple feature. If I went out and bought a car, I'd be pretty miffed to find out that a key function of that car (playing music) required owning a PC... Why is a phone any different? It's NOT a PC accessory.

I don't want to buy my music/video through iTunes either - I don't want to be locked into their service. Call me old fashioned - but I still buy music CDs. Then I can use them in the car as well as in my MP3 player, and I have a backup of them.

I guess the real question is, do we need an open standard of communication for this stuff? Contacts, e-mail, video, music - it's all pretty standard stuff we need....

This is all very interesting stuff. I am very interested in peoples views on the N97 as my 'Three' contact can be renewed from 18th August, but doubt I will get such a good deal as Spode I currently have a Nokia 6120 and have been thinking about the N97 but I fear it maybe a useless brick like my work T-Mobile MDA Pro turned into once the battery would not charge anymore.

I REALLY like the look of the E75 (http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-e75#/main/landing) as want something smaller, but with a keyboard. I hope it comes to 'Three' soon!

I have an E71 on '3' (as Gordon is probably getting bored of me mentioning on TR).

Regarding your difficulty with the Shift and Symbol/Function key, if it's anything like the E71, you don't actually have to hold it down. Just tap it once then tap the other key and it'll pick the symbol or capitalise.
For permanent numbers: double-tap the function key. Then one tap to return to normal.
For permanent caps: double-tap shift. To return, double-tap again.

Agree with the extra freedom afforded by being non-dependant on a computer. I got a chance to reflect on it this week when I had the "pleasure" of sampling an iPhone and realised I couldn't even remember where my Nokia sync cable was.

3 + the E71 is probably the best deal out there at the moment. 3's "unlimited" internet is 1GB, you have full Skype use and iPlayer functionality (including Streaming live TV - in your face iPhone, etc.) and many apps to discover if you can just be bothered with the effort (which is minimal).