13 October 2009 by Lars

Phone review: N97 (ongoing)

Next phone in line: Nokia’s latest “flagship” N97 touchscreen device. Verdict so far:so-so.

What works: browser (in portrait mode – in landscape mode, too much space is used for the title bar until it disappears again), photo browser (kinetic browsing is intuitive, but I think iphone is slicker). Re-ordering menu items in the apps browser (but how often do you do that??) The home screen with the customizable apps is really nice and useful, although it could use “profiles” – different configurations of the home screen that can be saved – I would have different ones depending on whether I’m at home, at work/travelling, in-network or roaming. (Non-touch feature) The destinations feasture

What doesn’t: most of the rest. This is a phone with a touchscreen, not a touchscreen phone. Most apps don’t really use the touch screen to their advantage. the music browser is a flagrant example: it’s just the classic Nokia music app, which you can scroll (on the scroll bar! no kinetic browsing here) with your fingers. Can’t drag and drop albums or music files onto a playlist – everything requires a menu – non-sensical on a touch-screen device.  Keyboard is too flat – an E71 keyboard is MUCH better, and from the looks of them, so are most Android keyboards.

I’ll likely be returning this one too.

Updated: Further peeves are: almost new phone, and already out of (i) space on C: drive, and I cannot find anything to uninstall (maybe the OTA upgrade?) and (ii) N-Gage always runs out of memory – with nothing else running.

#n97#nokia