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GOOD:

-Excellent hardware and construction
-Tactile keyboard
-Decent battery life and user replaceable battery
-Good media playback, stills camera and video camera
-Excellent screen resolution and picture quality
-Up to 48GB memory with 32GB as standard
-Ease of use (with intuitive built-in help options)

BAD:

-Sometimes sluggish operating system (which can be improved by Nokia via updates)
-No multi-touch screen

OVERALL RATING: 4/5

FULL REVIEW: While so-called ‘smart phones’ still make up a small proportion of all mobile phones in use, their sheer functionality and lower competing prices, especially when purchased with a phone plan, will inevitably mean that within a couple of years just about every mobile phone in Australia will belong to this category. Nokia, the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones by quite a margin, have recently released their much anticipated N97 smart phone – and it certainly packs functions galore.

When you first lay your eyes on the N97, it looks very much like many of today’s smart phones – a large touch screen, which takes up most of the front panel, plus one button. The sides of the phone have a few more buttons – lock/unlock slider, power button, volume up/down rocker switch (also doubles up as zoom in/out when in camera mode) and a dedicated camera shutter button. Connections are taken care of by a micro USB port and a 3.5mm headphone jack, plus Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. When you slide the phone open a full QWERTY keyboard pops out and the screen comes up at an angle, which conjures up an image of a small laptop and is handy when watching videos as you can simply rest the phone on a table with the screen facing you.

The hardware itself is of high quality as we’ve come to expect from high-end Nokias and the hardware specs are impressive. The camera is a 5MP affair and while it’s true to say there are higher resolution cameras in phones, their lenses and imaging software often turns out to be the weakest link. Not so with the Nokia, which has a Carl Zeiss lens and a flash, which will not only lights up the subject, but also helps the camera focus in low light. I am yet to come across a phone camera that could compete with an average dedicated ‘happy snapper’ camera, but this isn’t too shabby in the scheme of things. The front of the phone also has a smaller ‘web-cam’ type camera for making video calls – a feature not often used, but it’s there nonetheless.

The built-in memory is a whopper at 32GB and can be expanded to 48Gb by inserting a 16GB micro
SD card. This stores a lot of photos, videos, music and other files and media – plus of course applications (or ‘apps’). The battery is replaceable, which is a boon in the day and age when embedded batteries seem to be becoming the norm. Not only does this mean you’ll never have to send the phone away to have its battery replaced, but you can also buy a spare or two, if you anticipate being away from chargers for a while. The battery life was also pretty good, with around two days with Internet and Bluetooth constantly on and four or more days when used just as a phone.

The screen itself has very high resolution and the internal accelerometer automatically flips the screen content from portrait to landscape mode as you turn the phone – or when the keyboard is open it fixes itself to landscape mode. The screen is sharp as a tack and easy to read and being a touch screen, scrolling around is just a case of dragging it with your finger. Speaking of fingers, the keyboard does take a little getting used to, but I would rather use a ‘real’ keyboard than a virtual one on the screen, which also hogs up a lot of screen space and that’s something no phone will ever have. When you tap on the screen itself, there’s a small short vibration from the screen, which gives you some tactile feedback to let you know if the phone registered your input. Simple, but effective.

Once the battery was charged I slipped in my Telstra 3G SIM card and it was all ready to go. It does take a while to ‘boot up’, which isn’t that much of an issue, because the phone is normally turned on 24/7. The screen in pre-configured with news, weather, clock, Facebook, Nokia’s Ovi store (to buy and download applications) and some shortcut keys to things like Internet, maps, messaging and music player. If you don’t want any of these items you can customise the screen to show pretty much whatever suits you best, so all in all it’s very flexible.

All the bells and whistles aside, it’s a phone, so before delving in deeper it was time to make a few calls. The sound quality is right up there with the very best and actually sounds better than my home phone! Having a dedicated hardware volume controller on the side of the phone meant that it was easy to adjust the volume in mid-call, without having to take the phone away from my ear to look for a virtual volume controller on the screen. I suppose the phone could’ve been a bit louder, but as the call clarity was so good this wasn’t too much of an issue. Calls done, it was time to send a few texts and thanks to the proper QWERTY keyboard this was a breeze and there’s no need for predictive input.

With calls and texts out of the way, now it was time to hit the web. All in all this was a pretty self-explanatory experience and anyone who has ever used one of the previous N-Series phones would be right at home here. Most day-to-day features you might be used to from computer web browsers are there and as long as your phone contract has decent Internet bandwidth the whole experience was fairly zippy. You can bookmark sites, create folders for them to categorise them for easy house keeping and ‘recently visited pages’ are also displayed. I logged into Facebook and left the phone on-line and all the updates kept streaming in as they happened and the pre-installed Reuters news service kept up to date as did the weather service.

Because the screen does not support multi-touch some functionality was a little more ham-fisted than I would’ve liked. For example, instead of being able to use two fingers to zoom into the screen, you have to tap the side of the screen, which brings up a zoom tool. This applied throughout the operation, from photos to the web. This is something Nokia will simply have to address just to keep up with the competition. Nokia bought Navteq, one of the global digital mapping companies, a year and a bit ago and the included Navteq maps seemed pretty good, but this zooming business was a frustration I could’ve done without. The built-in GPS was good for a phone and provided decent accuracy once locked into satellites.

The phone was also sometimes a little sluggish to respond to user input, which again, at this price point, is not really acceptable. The phone uses the Symbian operating system, recently bought by Nokia and then made freeware, in its core and I can’t help but to feel this needs a rewrite, not just a tweak here or there. On a few occasions, when switching applications, the screen would simply go blank for a while. This was frustrating, because I wasn’t sure if it had crashed or if it was just taking its time to get there. It always turned out to be the latter, so smoother performance is highly desired – or at least give me an ‘hour-glass’ icon, so I know what’s going on.

The media side of things is superb for a phone with great video playback and audio quality. With phones this good at media, the argument for mp3 players and alike gets harder to defend, plus you’re most likely to have your phone with you at all times. Music and other media can be transferred into the phone from a computer or downloaded from Nokia’s Music Store – or any other on-line music store. Having a standard 3.5mm headphone jack makes it easy to pick and choose your own headphones – even though a pair of ‘standard jobbies’ are included. The N97 even has an FM transmitter, so you can stream music from your phone directly to an FM radio without the need for any car kits or alike. It also has an FM receiver, so you can listen to FM radio as long you have ‘compatible’ headphones attached as the headphone cable is used as an aerial.

All in all I did enjoy my time with the Nokia N97 and had been anticipating a face-to-face with it since it was first announced back in 2008. The hardware certainly didn’t disappoint, but having said that, the operating system could have been a bit smoother. It’s easy to use and logical, but lacks some of that ‘Wow-factor’ I was expecting – and considering Nokia’s pedigree it should have delivered it in bundles. Software tweaks and improvements are going on constantly and I have no doubt about Nokia’s ability to smooth these issues out in the way of updates. As things stand, the N97 is my favourite smart phone on the market, but Nokia will have to up the ante a little in order to stay at the top of the mountain. It is a hugely competitive and subsequently lucrative market, with many players trying to topple each other.