Nokia N97 review

The Nseries has blazed a fairly impressive trail through the mainstream highways of the smartphone market since its debut in 2005, but Nokia claims that the N97 is the most anticipated N-series phone to date. It’s a little different to its direct predecessors though, the N96 and N95, featuring a slide-out Qwerty keyboard.

Of course, in line with the current mobile trends, it’s got a great big touchscreen too. However, unlike all the biggest and brightest stars in the touchscreen sky, it’s of the resistive type rather than the capacitive sort made, well, ubiquitous by the iPhone.

This type of touchscreen is generally used more with a stylus than a finger, but Nokia has done its best to make sure that the N97 can be operated fairly easily with a finger too. Unfortunately, it still can’t compete with its capacitive touchscreen rivals. Although responsive, it doesn’t cope well with the lighter touch that’s more comfortable to use when casually navigating around your phone.

There is a mini stylus included for when you need that extra level of precision, but it doesn’t slot into the phone, making it both eminently lose-able and a pain to remember to carry around with you.

To mitigate for the slight lack of touchscreen agility, a halo pops up around menu items as you drag your finger about the standard menu. It’s more problematic if you’re texting or emailing using the keypad-apeing interface on the touchscreen though.

Then again, that’s predominantly what the Qwerty has been added for. Its keys have a somewhat spongy feel, making it less than perfect for typing at speed. The layout is fairly well suited to two-thumbed texting, although the D-pad to the left of the Qwerty means that it’s not centred. This means there’s a light learning curve to using it, but nothing that a few days of acclimatisation won’t cure.

There’s still a sense that the N97 is stuck between two control methods, neither of which are perfect, especially when neither the Qwerty nor the slightly clumsy touchscreen are amazingly good for inputting numbers- very useful for a phone.

To make the phone’s more advanced features accessible, the N97 has a customisable home screen. It’s made up of six different slots that you can assign widgets to. Pre-installed widgets include the calendar, Facebook update, the music player, FM transmitter and a collection of other applications. Adding and removing them is simple. All you do is press down on the widget’s slot until a menu pops up, which lets you add and remove widgets as you like.

Incidentally Nokia is spending a lot of money to encourage people in India to create their own custom widgets - indeed it promoted an online competition on this very website. It obviously wants to encourage the kind of vibrant development community that has made the iPhone's App Store such a success.

Meanwhile back to the hardware, and compared to rivals like the HTC G1 and LG Arena, the N97’s home screen seems clumsy, ugly and lacking in customisation options. Even if you change the widgets around and add your own phone theme, the N97 is always going to be encrusted with a thick layer of the phone’s in-built (lack of) style. And it’s starting to feel distinctly lumpen.

That said its feature set is fairly impressive. There is 32GB of storage built-in, and the ability to add an additional HC microSD card, with official support running up to 16GB, makes it a viable alternative to a hard disk MP3 player. The 3.5mm headphone jack seals the deal.

Add in the FM transmitter and it’ll even be your very own in-car jukebox. However, the RDS FM radio did have trouble finding stations in our tests, although whether you’ll have similar problems will likely be dependent on the strength of signal in you area. Connectivity options are also comprehensive, with Wi-Fi and - for the future - HSDPA onboard.

We weren’t quite so impressed with one of the N97’s other key feature areas- the camera. It has five megapixels to its name, accompanied by a dual flash. While it performed fine in optimum conditions, it stumbled when subjected to anything but the most consistent of lighting. Plus, it’s slow to acclimatise to changes in environmental light so, if you were to move your focus around a room with varying light levels, you’ll need to hold the N97 in place for several seconds after its focused before it’s actually ready to take a decent photo.

To an extent, it’s a case of adapting to the camera’s learning curve, as the N97 is capable of producing impressive photos, even if it lets out the occasionally inexplicably blurry shot.

Still, much like the N97’s other features, it’s far from the top of its field. Unfortunately, this trend becomes what categorises the phone. It does a lot of things, sure, but is a master of none of them.

The touchscreen is responsive considering it uses resistive technology, but isn’t on par with capacitive rivals. The interface tries to make the phone’s screen handy for the connected mobile generation, but is left chewing on the dust of Android phones. And, while we don’t like to dwell on megapixels too much, the camera doesn’t cut it against the best of them.

The Qwerty keyboard does add something to the N-series roster, and if you haven’t used any other keyboard-toting phones before, it’ll doubtless make your emailing a lot easier. Even that feature is bettered elsewhere, with handsets like the HTC Touch Pro 2 sporting larger keys. The N97’s certainly not a bad handset, but unless you’re an N-series devotee, it shouldn’t be right at the top of your list.