With so many features and a snappy slider design, why did Nokia's best of the best still come up short? Find out in our Nokia N97 review.
Review summary of the Nokia N97:
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 The Nokia N97 wouldn't be such a disappointing device if it weren't supposed to be the flagship multimedia smartphone for the largest handset manufacturer in the world. It has some great specs, including that impressive 32GB of storage (expandable to 48GB), a solid, smart design, and hefty battery power. However, the touchscreen interface seems more like a few touch controls laid atop a standard Symbian S60 interface. When the Nokia N97 gets things right, they are right indeed. We thought the build quality, especially the hinge mechanism, was superlative, and most of the external design was spot-on. The keyboard was cozy, even with its unique layout, and our biggest problem was the lack of onboard apps to support the messaging features. In the end, we'd recommend a Nokia Eseries for serious messaging and business users, and a Nokia N85 for camera and multimedia enthusiasts. For true touchscreen fans, we'd look somewhere else. Release: June 2009. Price: $650.
Pros: Great hardware. Superior specs, including massive storage and great connectivity. Good keyboard. Long battery life.
Cons: Mediocre touch interface design. Apps not optimized well for touch. Camera, media playback features underpowered.
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Full Nokia N97 Review:
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Design – Very Good
In terms of the hardware design, the Nokia N97 is a superb, polished phone. The thick tablet clicks open with a firm snap to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. Open, the screen lies at an angle to the keys, similar to the HTC Touch Pro 2. Overall, the phone has a solid construction, with one of the snappiest slides we've ever used, and a nice fit and finish that makes the N97 recognizable as the top of the Nseries lineup. The face has only 3 keys: Send, End and Menu keys, though we think it could use one or two more, perhaps a "Back" key up front. Otherwise, we like the clean, classy looks that doesn't shy away from standardized ports or external controls like other touchscreen phones, and doesn't aim for a look too minimalist for our taste.
The Nokia N97 improves very little on the interface from the company's first major tablet phone, the Nokia 5800. Compared to far superior models like, well, everything else with a touchscreen (the Apple iPhone 3G, Palm Pre and HTC Touch Diamond 2 are obvious examples), the interface on the Nokia N97 seems amateurish and basic, as if Nokia did as little as possible to add touch to the Symbian S60 OS. There are no transition animations between screens and apps. Most apps use onscreen buttons and menus when simple gesture commands would have been more convenient and intuitive. It simply does not look impressive, and while we may have been forgiving on the less-expensive, music focused Nokia 5800, considering the Nokia N97 costs more than twice as much, we were hoping for more.
To Nokia's credit, the touch interface is often more useful than aesthetic. The home screen is a simple collection of Widget panels, and though these never looked great, they did offer plenty of useful features. A Facebook widget will report incoming messages and partial status updates from friends. So too will the e-mail widget. There is a widget to control music, a widget for the weather, and so on. Nothing groundbreaking, but Nokia lets you customize the widgets and their arrangement, and the phone offers an enticing Download link from the Widget screen that we hope means more will be offered soon, as developer support grows.
Calling – Very Good
Keeping with their solid tradition, the Nokia N97 has some strong calling features and good call quality. We tested the phone on AT&T's 3G network in the greater Dallas area, and we were very impressed with the sound quality during calls. Our callers reported a clear, bright sound to our voices, and we heard our end of the conversation easily. The phone continually reported a full 7 bars of AT&T service during our tests. Battery life was also especially impressive, considering the competition. With its huge, 1500 mAh battery, our Nokia N97 review unit was able to top 6 hours of talking time even while we used AT&T's battery-hogging HSDPA network. Nokia phones also do a nice job handling power while they're not in use. Even left aside for a while, the N97 did a fine job holding its charge on standby.
For contacts and addresses, you can use the included Nokia Ovi Suite for contact sync, but we prefer to use Nokia's free Mail for Exchange software. Though it lacks some of the robustness we appreciate on a Windows Mobile phone, MfE synchronized our test unit with our corporate contact lists. We wish the Nokia N97 would jump right into a contact search when we started typing a name at the home screen, but contacts were still easy to manage once we were synced with the server.
The Nokia N97, like most Nokia phones weve tried, just can't get voice dialing right. In 10 attempts, the N97 guessed the correct name only once, and another time offered the correct name as the third choice in a list. Otherwise, the speaker independent voice dialing was a complete bust. Conference calling was easy thanks to the large, onscreen buttons on the dialing screen. Still, even with a few helpful buttons, the phone offers very little control of information during calls. While other touchscreen phones offer slick, adaptive menus during calls, the Nokia N97 sticks to the bare basics, with some ugly monochrome buttons to boot.
Messaging and Keyboard – Good
As the top of the line phone in Nokia's Nseries arsenal, and the first with a full QWERTY keyboard, it is surprising that Nokia doesn't ship the Nokia N97 with more messaging options onboard. There is support for a very basic SMS and MMS client. There is no threaded text messaging to help keep track of conversations; this is a simpler wireframe app with no frills. There are no instant messaging clients on board. Usually we suggest downloading a third-party app for IM on Symbian phones, but the Ovi Store, so new to the platform, doesn't contain a single instant messaging application that will work with the touchscreen Nokia N97. There is a Facebook app that works with widget on the phone's homescreen. We wish there were more of these social networking apps for messaging, especially dedicated Twitter and MySpace Widgets for our homescreen, as well.
The best messaging feature on the Nokia N97, for us, was the Mail for Exchange app, but even this doesn't come close to the Exchange experience on a Windows Mobile phone. We couldn't dig into our subfolders, view HTML e-mail or quickly manage and delete useless messages.
The keyboard on the Nokia N97 is nice and wide, and was plenty easy for typing. We think Nokia could do better, but between this and the similarly side-sliding Nokia E75, we prefer the keys on the Nokia N97. Even with the 4-way button, the keyboard is still plenty large, and each letter gets its own soft and rubbery key. The space bar is strangely pushed off to one side, but we got used to this layout surprisingly quickly. If anything, we'd wish for more keys, with some shortcuts and perhaps a dedicated number row. But the hardware keyboard was the best part about the messaging experience on the Nokia N97.
There are software keyboards available onscreen if you don't want to open the phone, but we'd suggest avoiding them at all costs. The worst of these was a split grid of keys, arranged alphabetically, not in QWERTY fashion, that divided the letters among 2 pages. It was easily the least useful onscreen keyboard we have ever used on any phone.
Multimedia - Good
For multimedia playback, the Nokia N97 packs some serious hardware, but can't quite manage the interface and apps to handle all that power. The phone comes with a whopping 32GB of onboard memory, as capacious as any phone on the market, but you can also top off the N97 with a 16GB microSDHC card, bringing the grand total to 48GB. The phone uses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so we could use our own earbuds. Or, the phone also comes with an FM transmitter on board, as well as stereo Bluetooth, for a few wireless music options. Music transfers are handled via microUSB over a USB 2.0 connection. We like the wealth of standardized options, and the ability to charge the phone while transferring songs over microUSB.
The music player itself was less than impressive, basically the same old player we've seen on Symbian phones for years, now touchable. There was no cool coverflow or album artwork scrolling, no interesting visual effects or gestures. The player did a fine job for basic music playback, with large buttons and a simple display. Still, we wish it looked more modern. We appreciated the widget on the home screen, but it lacked fine control over our library and playback. There are EQ effects and some stereo widening to improve the sound, but we were also let down by the phone's onboard speakers. Other recent Nseries phones, especially the Nokia N85, could sing a bit louder, and with better sound.
The video player app is even more basic and barebones than music, but like the music player, it got the job done. The player was able to handle our videos if they were properly formatted, and this unfortunately excluded DivX or H.264 video codecs. Basic MP4 files played with no problem, and the phone did a fine job downscaling larger, 640 by 480 pixel VGA videos to fit the shorter 360 pixel height on the Nokia N97's screen. Still, we're disappointed that Nokia has excluded some of the more popular codecs for this phone, as its large, crisp screen could have made it a video powerhouse.
Web browsing – Very Good
The Nokia Nseries devices always impressed with their Web browsing ability, and the Nokia N97 does an admirable job, but the transition to touch hasn't added any new features, and some of our favorites are now missing. The mini map is gone, replaced by a simpler zoom slide that adds an extra couple of steps to browsing long Web pages. T-Mobile's G1 uses a touchable sort of mini map, and we wish Nokia would have gone this route. The browser rendered pages very nicely. Our own homepage looked perfect on the phone's screen. Still, both CNN and the New York Times refused to offer up their full desktop versions to our Nokia N97 review unit, and there was no way to change the way the browser describes itself (desktop vs. mobile) in the settings. Though pages loaded quickly, whether we were using the 3G HSDPA network or our own home Wi-Fi umbrella, we still wish the browser was more responsive. Flicking through pages or double-tapping to zoom in on text always produced a slight lag, and we wish these gestures would simply spring to action.
The Nokia N97 comes packed with Flash Lite 3.0, which means the phone can play videos directly from the YouTube Web page. In fact, though the phone seems to come with a dedicated YouTube app, this was only a link to the YouTube mobile page. Viewing the desktop version of YouTube in the Nokia N97's browser, we were able to play videos within the Web page itself, and the Nokia N97 did a better job handling Flash content than any other mobile phone we've seen. Pages still slowed to a halt while a video was playing, but video playback was completely watchable, if not smooth.
Camera - Good
After being so impressed by the camera on the Nokia N85, we were let down by the 5-megapixel shooter on the Nokia N97. Pictures still looked very good on this phone. Colors were usually accurate and vibrant, and we were able to achieve some nice depth of field effects from the auto focus lens. Low light handling was quite poor, though, and the dual LED flash did very little to help the situation. Even under the best outdoor lighting, pictures that weren't close-ups looked messy at full crop, like an oil painting rather than a richly detailed shot. Under more dim lighting, detail disappears entirely, white balance jumps ship and noice problems take over. Check out our sample pics below for the best of what we shot during our test period.
Orchid Close-Up
Orchid with Dual LED flash
Mottled Landscape
Flower in Hand
Self Portrait
Flower and Wood
Video recording performance on our Nokia N97 review unit wasn't bad. The phone can record video at either full VGA resolution, or it can crop the vertical a bit to 640 by 360 pixels to match the screen's resolution. Either way, videos were a bit blocky and fuzzy-looking, but far superior to the dreck available on most cameraphones. The Nokia N97, like all Nokia Nseries phones, also has some nice uploading options. We had no trouble uploading our pics to our Flickr site, though we wish the phone could handle a queue instead of making us wait through each upload to transfer the next.
GPS Navigation - Good
For GPS navigation, the Nokia N97 uses Nokia Maps. It's a nice mapping app, and it works well for turn-by-turn directions, but it clearly isn't ready for the N97's touchscreen. First of all, the globe on the opening Maps screen spins the wrong way when you touch it. Overall, the maps were not very responsive to touch input. The road headings were also clipped on the phone's screen, so that we usually didn't know if we were supposed to take a highway heading east or west unless we followed the actual driving route, instead of reading the signs.
Price and availability
The Nokia N97 is currently available unlocked in the U.S. from Nokia and online retailers for about $650.
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