Review: Nokia N97

It might have been all about the likes of Android and Apple over the last year or so, but it’s important we don’t forget that Nokia is still top of the pile, and has sought to maintain that lead by bringing out another flagship handset, the N97.

The phone is essentially laid out to be a mini-UMPC, with a slide out screen nestling at a roughly 40 degree angle on top of a full QWERTY keyboard. Sliding it up and down feels solid and very satisfying; in fact, it’s easy to see that a few people will probably end up breaking the screen as they’ll simply be idly flipping it up and down all the time.

Even still, it feels like it would be a while before you did that with the Nokia N97, such is its build quality. The chrome rim around the whole handset is a nice (if fingerprint attracting) touch, and the whole thing feels solid and stable in the hand, and the massive internal 32GB memory (which can be supplemented up to 64GB with a microSD card) gave us the feeling we had a powerhouse on our hands.

It’s obviously going to be once again compared to the likes of RIM’s general BlackBerry range (despite Nokia’s extensive E-series competition) thanks to the keyboard, as well as the Apple iPhone 3G and the HTC Magic, just by the fact that it’s a high end touchscreen device with a QWERTY input.

In fairness, it’s probably more iPhone than BlackBerry, as it clearly doesn’t have email at the heart, but is more to fulfil the needs of the consumer who likes to message a fair bit as well as multi-task.

It seems a little chunky, which is strange considering it’s only 15.9mm thick. You obviously have to accept a fair amount of depth to the handset if you’re after a QWERTY keyboard, but there’s a notion that this still feels a little large and creates something of a protrusion from the average pocket.

The lock key is a slider on the left hand side of the phone, which quickly brings the phone in and out of sleep mode, and is one of the better options we’ve seen to do so, especially as it gives a satisfying buzz when activating and deactivating.

We’re certainly very glad that Nokia has made the clever decision to add a 3.5mm headphone jack onto the phone, especially with the depth that’s just been mentioned giving it no excuse not to get the drill out. It’s well placed at the top of the device, although being further to the right or left would probably have made it more comfortable in the hand.

In the box there are the usual suspects, albeit devoid of the 3.5mm adaptor, which is a lovely reminder that you’re not going to have to fork out for loads of replacements in the future. The new charger with the USB connector is obviously included but if you’re like most others on the planet you’ll have around 50 legacy Nokia chargers and there’s an adaptor for both the old and the older chargers in the box too, which is a really nice touch.

Talking of which Nokia’s excellent hands free kit and less excellent headphones are included in the box, as well as a screen wiper for when you get your mucky paws all over the shiny and scratch-resistant touch screen.

Nokia has rehashed its Symbian S60 OS for the fifth time on this handset (and also the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic) but has sadly decided against making any wholesale changes, which is a shame as it means the lag and general bugginess of navigation through the handset is still very much apparent. That’s not to say we’re talking the same fail rate of the first N95 or the N96, but there’s a definite sensation that the Nokia N97 still falls some way short of the noted slickness of the HTC Magic or the Apple iPhone.

This could be partly down to using a less-than-500MHz processor on board this mini-computer, where the lack of power is horribly apparent at times and makes you wish that the designers had picked up a Snapdragon processor in the building process, as with a 1GHz effort under the hood it’s easy to imagine the Nokia N97 would be able to whizz through almost any task with aplomb.

The new home screen, designed specifically for the Nokia N97, has elements of the 5800 XpressMusic about it (ie being able to select four favourite contacts) but has added in a great number of widgets to choose from, which automatically re-align themselves from landscape to portrait as necessary.

The default widgets (Email, Facebook, Accuweather, shortcuts, favourite contacts and clock function) are a decent selection, and can be added to with a whole range of items, from a news feed index to extra contacts to a miniaturised music player. There are also those like an Amazon widget, which seems to only display random items as a hyperlink, and are a bit less useful. But overall, a nice selection that it’s a shame you can’t add to, and we’d like to think there’s a chance that Nokia will extend the range on offer in future firmware updates and the like.

However, the default widgets, which are also the first thing that people will see when turning the phone on for the first time, are a little unpredictable and prone to error. For instance, the Accuweather function flitted between showing excellent weather updates for our current location and not being able to load at all, with a strange mangled graphic thrown in every so often for good measure.

Similarly, the Facebook application, which showed messages and friend requests as well as status updates, frequently decided to log us out of our account, no matter how many times we requested to go back in and look at our full profile in the mobile version of the social network, as well as opting to show a portion of the home screen when in landscape mode, which looks frankly amateur for a phone of this potential.

The menu screen has evolved nicely over the time Nokia have been mass producing mobile phones and is still laid out nicely in the grid system many other manufacturers have mimicked over the years. A little spinning disc next to an icon means that it’s running in the background, and the interface has been cleaned up for the S60 5th edition with fewer icons on the main menu page, although we’re a little perplexed as to why the calendar is one of them.

We can only assume that Nokia’s research showed it that the main demographic for this phone would be using it to make a lot of dates and meetings, otherwise it would have been better served by putting a video player or similar there instead.

The applications section in the bottom left of the screen is where all downloaded programs from the newly created Ovi Store now live, which means that it can quickly become cluttered with different applications. The Apple iPhone obviously brings a similar navigation system to the party, but we had hoped that Nokia would have found a more efficient way of searching through the plethora of applications we would be looking for.

The touchscreen on the Nokia N97, despite being resistive, is faster and more responsive than that found on the 5800 XpressMusic, with clear presses enabled from the off thanks to larger and wider buttons. Each menu comes complete with its own virtual scroll bar at the side, and despite being slim it’s surprisingly easy to ‘grab’and slide up and down, so menu navigation is blindingly simple on the Nokia N97.

Anyone that’s played with a Nokia phone before knows how to call and use contacts, as it’s among the most rudimentary methods of finding your friends on the phone that there is.

First of all, the ‘favourite contacts’ tab on the home screen gives instant access to your buddies with a picture attached. In the default theme this uses a black font to write the name of each person across the photograph, which means most of the time you can’t read the label. However, with them being a favourite you probably don’t need it, but still it’s rather irritating. Changing themes sorts the problem out, but it’s another ‘out of the box’ faux pas for the Nokia N97.

The same favourites are listed at the top of the contacts screen, where users can either type in the name of the person they’re searching for, or scroll down using the slide bar at the side. Both methods allow you to find the person you’re after pretty easily, although if you have over 200 contacts in the phone book you’ll struggle to use the slide bar to land accurately on the right person.

Each person is neatly laid out with simple icons to call, message or video call the person, as well as a group effort should they belong to another set of users on the phone.

Call quality is a little less impressive however, with nearly all the calls we made on the test handset not connecting the first time despite having more than enough signal. This seemed like a teething problem at first but then developed into a full-time raging issue, as trying to make a call took at least two or three minutes more than it was meant to.

Also, if you answer the phone when slid open, it automatically defaults to speaker mode. While this is a useful feature, most of the time you’ll want to talk normally on the phone, so you have to slide it shut before you can answer the call. The aforementioned lag on the new S60 system means that you have to wait around two seconds before you can answer the phone after shutting the handset, which again is irritating.

The call and terminate buttons are touch sensitive, which adds an elegant sleekness to the phone but can be murder to hit accurately half the time, even with haptics turned up to full blast. The menu button is thankfully raised, but you always have to look to see where your fingers are when using the green and red buttons, again adding time to the calling process.

As you can imagine, messaging is where the phone comes to the fore. While the QWERTY keypad might be a little more flush and ever so slightly smaller than other efforts, it’s still very easy to hit with average sized hands, and within minutes we were typing at around 60% speed compared to a normal keyboard, which is excellent for a mobile phone.

However, others that tried the keyboard were less impressed, stating that it was harder to hit the keys and the flush nature of the keyboard made it harder to find the right button each time, but there was likely an element of getting used to a new system as most of the people surveyed had barely used a QWERTY keyboard on a phone before.

Messaging on the Symbian S60 system is pretty much the same fare as it ever has been before. Simple keys at the side to send messages, add contacts and attach files are a nice effort to add a bit of functionality to proceedings, and the general day to day texting was easy and simple to do, even with one hand when on a crowded train (although we did nearly elbow someone in the face when flicking it open).

Emailing, which was among the easiest to set up as we only needed to put in our Gmail address and password, was less of a pleasant experience after initialisation, with slow updating of the inbox and no HTML option to speak of making only the most basic of emailing possible.

Composing an email was nice and straightforward though, being very similar to the method of writing an SMS / MMS.

Email was seemingly only updated once we went in and looked at the inbox, being prompted to connect to the mailbox to check for updates. However, despite turning the feature on the first day we got the handset, the option to auto-update the inbox decided to start working after three days… perhaps we inadvertently altered some settings to start the process, but it was going to be a major black mark to have the email on the home screen but not to update every 15 minutes or so.

As you can imagine on a high resolution widescreen mobile phone, the internet experience was a real pleasure in both portrait and landscape modes, especially using the previously excellent Symbian internet browser.

Using the phone to navigate the web in both 3G and Wi-Fi modes was virtually indistinguishable thanks to the speed of loading, which was doubly impressive when you consider the comparatively slow processor on board beneath the shiny exterior.

Pages like the BBC mobile website and Wikipedia appeared superbly fast on the screen, and even heavier mobile sites that use a lot of Flash animation in adverts loaded much faster than we were expecting.

Navigation was also of a similar standard to other phones, with double tapping to zoom in as well as a simple touch-and-scroll method of moving around the pages. And if that wasn’t enough for some people, it’s also possible to use the D-pad on the QWERTY keyboard to scroll around for accuracy, with the central button used for clicking links.

It might have been nice to see that central button used as an optical trackpad, like that seen in the Samsung i8510, but it’s possible that we’re just being greedy in asking for that AND a touchscreen.

However, one of the annoying things about the internet was the inability to reload without going through a whole mess of menus. In the past with the S60 browser it was possible to simply click and hold anywhere on the screen to bring up a set of quick functions, and despite being able to do so in other applications it’s been stripped from this browser. It’s hardly a dealbreaker for a phone with an excellent internet effort, but still it’s always confusing when a company removes something useful.

On the outside, the camera looks decent if unspectacular, with another Carl Zeiss lens (and a pretty spiffy dual LED flash) beneath a slide-out screen to protect the snapper and also start the camera (in a similar vein to the Sony Ericsson C905) although as you can see from the pictures below, this still quickly filled up with dust and fluff.

The interface on the camera looks like it’s simple with very little functionality, but once you press the menu button a whole host of options present themselves to you. Users can change almost all settings, from ISO to exposure as well as having a grid placed on top to take better snaps which gave a nice camera-rich experience.

The video camera is a little bit more bog standard, but thanks to the 32GB of internal memory you can record nearly two hours of DVD-like footage from the handset. Why you’d want to is beyond us, as for that long you’d probably just buy a camcorder, but we never like to turn down options here on TechRadar.

Here’s how the Nokia N97 fared against an Olympus SP-565UZ camera in our like-for-like picture test:

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

The Olympus obviously performs much better than the N97 thanks to being a higher end, dedicated camera, but the N97 still fares well in overcast longer shots.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

With a bright background, the N97 manages to maintain macro focus while keeping the background roughly in shot. However, it’s powerless to prevent the light bleeding through, while the Olympus manages to keep things sharp and colours vivid.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

The difference between the two cameras here is both startling and captures the essence of how a cameraphone differs from a dedicated snapper. The fire and scene is much easier to see with the N97, but the Olympus is much more the device you want when you’re trying to ‘properly’ photograph a fire scene with wildly varying brightness levels.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

In perhaps the most stark contrast between the two devices, the Nokia N97 cannot even come close to matching the Olympus for clarity, sharpness and detail, instead letting the minimal light ‘wash-out’ the whole picture.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

Night imaging, despite using a dual LED flash, is never going to beat a decent Xenon effort as clearly shown here. Colour reproduction and scene light equality is of varying quality for the Nokia N97, but is clear as day with the Olympus.

Obviously with a 32GB internal memory, media is going to figure heavily on this phone, and it certainly does through photo, video and audio playback all on offer, as well as the usual sound recording options.

What is more confusing is how underpowered each one of these options is when used to the full extent we’ve come to expect thanks to great handsets from the likes of HTC, Apple and Samsung.

The video player, for instance, doesn’t play AVI files, which means most of our video collection is suddenly obsolete. An extensive search around the nascent Ovi Store found no solution yet (although it obviously is very early days) so that means the lovely widescreen display is going to be getting very little video use.

The MP3 player is admittedly fine, cranking out all the tunes we threw at it (DRM-free of course, but that’s surely to be expected). However we were promised a Comes with Music variant of the N97 and with no such thing in sight, the music player just seems a little too bog standard, although the addition of the homescreen widget does help a lot.

Similarly, the photo browser is a nightmare when you’re trying to track down a photo that wasn’t taken with the camera or in the same folder, with you being forced through the clumsy file browser to find where your ported snaps are being held prisoner.

However, this time the Ovi Store did give us a new photo browser, and totally unsurprisingly you could look at every photo on the phone in one swoop along an image wall. We’re a little disappointed that Nokia hasn’t managed to sort out easy photo viewing in the box by now on its S60 handsets, having spent hours waiting and waiting for thumbnails to load on previous handsets.

We were a little bit more excited to find a YouTube icon in the applications menu, as tailored players are generally excellent on handsets. But once again we were disappointed that it was nothing more than a link to YouTube Mobile with an automatic full screen version, which was in itself grainy and underwhelming.

Given the potential of this handset (and to be fair, it does have a great audio output even through the bundled headphones) we were hoping for a lot more on the media front and were left sorely disappointed.

The Nokia N97 is the first handset from the Finnish company to have the Ovi Store on the phone from the start, and we took very little time to start having a root around. We can only hope that the amount of applications available to browse on the phone accelerates quickly as the early selection pales into comparison when placed next to the hundred trillion or so applications available from the Apple App Store.

As mentioned above, we only managed to find one application to solve a problem on the phone, but given the love developers have for being the first to fix a phone’s flaw, we can’t imagine the problem will last for long.

We delved into a selection of the free ones on offer to see how effectively they worked on the Nokia N97, and we found a mixed bag of results.

The first, called the Journey, was an interactive game where you needed to physically move to become involved. We started off by moving the 100 or so metres instructed to start our detective’s mission, but after walking continuously for around 15 minutes nothing seemed to change and we quickly bored of the mission.

To be fair, we’ve read great things on the game from others on the internet, so it’s certainly one that could showcase the phone’s talent, it’s just a shame we never solved our first murder.

The next, SMS Preview, boded a lot better as it simply said it would show you text messages on the screen rather than having to open them. In landscape mode this was a great feature, meaning you could look at what was in the message quickly (although the font is so small you then don’t need to read the text and thus have to go into the messaging folder just to delete it). However, in portrait mode the preview pane stayed in landscape mode, meaning half the message was missing.

These applications were dumped at the bottom of the icon list in the applications folder rather than being grouped, so each time we got a new program to play with we were forced to scroll through scores of others to find it.

The bundled Nokia Maps is still a poor man’s Google Maps, and looks set to stay that way on the Nokia N97 as the spinning globe idea just doesn’t work on a phone with this kind of power. It couldn’t find Oxford St despite us typing it in three different ways, and from that moment we converted to Google Maps, which downloaded and installed quickly and also made good use of the on board GPS.

Other neat applications on the handset include the FM transmitter, which (as you’d expect) transmitted FM nicely to a nearby stereo and thereby made speakers unnecessary (we still like that feature in any phone) and Reuters Slideshow, which was perplexing as it showed you the news in pictures only before you clicked in to find the story. However, it was a nice and slick interface on the application, so we liked it for that and having to guess the news made for good clean commuting fun.

The first thing that impressed us about the battery life is the fact that it could be charged fully in roughly two hours, which is more handy than people realise when you suddenly are aware you need full juice for a trip away or similar.

However, the quoted 20 days of standby seems a little optimistic, given that we could get around 1.5 days out of the phone on an average charge, and managed to run it down in a day twice under very heavy usage conditions. Given that it’s supposed to give you over 30 hours of music playback, it’s probably best you don’t use it for anything else to come near to that point.

The organiser on the phone is obviously tailored more towards the business user, given that the calendar is within easy reach and the Office suite being well stocked. However, we were hoping to try and write some of this phone’s review on the handset itself, but were met with a myriad of ‘No Application License’ and ‘Connect to download catalogue’ error messages from the QuickOffice application, to which we could find no solution, so writing our own document was sadly out of the question.

If we had to guess, we’d say this was down to having an early model and Nokia will fix this soon, but we were a little disappointed by the fact we couldn’t put together a word, spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation.

The calendar was a different story though, as it took to touchscreen well. Inputting meetings and reminders was a lot easier thanks to the large buttons placed at the side, and the reminders were subtle yet helpful, which we were pleased to see.

Much has been made of Nokia’s switch to Ovi Suite, and it seems with good reason as the new software gives you so much more than before. We’re talking separate music, maps, photo viewers and even a home streaming tool to allow you to make the most of your Nokia phone.

The software took nearly 35 minutes to download and install all the components (that’s despite doing it off the bundled CD) and the first thing we did was to launch the Home Media Server. We couldn’t make it connect to anything, as all it wanted to do was continually eat up all our PC’s memory and slow everything down, so we were gutted we never got to play with that properly and in the end happy that we hadn’t burnt out the processor, such was the strain it appeared to put on our Windows Vista machine.

The Ovi Suite was a lot more intuitive than previous efforts, encouraging us to sync across all our media, back up contacts and even throw it all online to make it safe forever as Nokia tries to integrate all its services. We found no great urge to do so however thanks to a lifetime of ignoring bundled phone software, but Nokia’s integrated approach certainly made it a lot more appealing.

The connections on the phone are varied and plentiful, with HSDPA super fast internet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, assisted GPS and the previously mentioned FM transmitter all present and correct.

The GPS was probably the best of the lot, taking just 20 seconds to initialise and find us while walking down Piccadilly Circus, where many phones have simply given up before thanks to the plethora of tall buildings and overhanging trees, although it was less successful when trying to do so on a train.

The 3G was probably the worst of all the connections, as it frequently dropped out on us despite the signal generally being very strong. What was more annoying was the insistence on using GPRS connection when losing 3G but then moving back into its signal; the phone wouldn’t find the super fast frequency unless specifically told to, even though it should be surely automatic.

The other connections (especially Wi-Fi) were fast and easy to set up, and on that basis deserve full marks for the Nokia N97.

It’s difficult to know how to judge the Nokia N97, as the first impressions thanks to great build quality and an excellent QWERTY keyboard made us think this could be the greatest Nokia phone yet.

It’s not actually that far off either, as it has the best example of the high-powered Symbian S60 OS we’ve seen so far, and the touchscreen is up there with the other top touch handsets considering it’s a resistive rather than capacitive effort.

But the questions over why certain features haven’t been added mount up. Why is the processor not more powerful? Why is the layout of the phone essentially the same as before despite the refresh? Why is there no stylus in the box when we had two variations with the 5800 XpressMusic? Where is Comes with Music?

None of the above should be taken to mean this is a bad phone. By all means, it’s a decent effort and not bad for around £500 SIM free. The angled touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard are to die for, and the connection to the Ovi Store promises bountiful upgrades, especially when we have 32GB of space to fill up.

But the media capabilities and niggly 3G connection are among the biggest annoyances, as well as the propensity of the Nokia N97 to crash and lag all too frequently. The Facebook problems were vastly annoying, as was the AccuWeather crashing, and this was just from the initial home screen.

Nokia fans will see this as a definite upgrade from what’s been offered before, and those that appreciate a decent form factor in a phone will definitely do so too. But there’s just too many annoying parts to the Nokia N97 to label it a classic, but if you’re stuck with it for 18 months (at least) then you can at least take solace in the fact there are many, many worse handsets out there on the market to be imprisoned with.

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