gali

My current phone is a Nokia N97, Nokia’s current flagship N-Series “device that does everything”, and a handset that has received a wide range of reviews and commentaries from wondrous praise through to damning criticism. As with many products with such reviews, every review has some basis in truth.

The lack of kinetic scrolling beyond the web browser is disappointing (at least until the v20 firmware is released), especially given I own an iPod touch with all its omnipresent smooth scrolling. The QWERTY keyboard, while being something I missed since the days of my 9210, is probably the worst Symbian powered keyboard I’ve had the pleasure of using – 3 rows, and interesting choices of placement for some common symbols slows down text entry. Gone are the days of the Psion Series 5′s amazing keyboard that I could thumb type on almost as quickly as I could my PC. And on top of all that, while Symbian is well established, familiar and pretty robust, it is still growing into the world of the touch screen.

And yet, despite the various little quirks that irk me on occasion, especially when I consider the competition, I still feel I made the right choice in paying full price to buy a N97 off contract, and that it is perhaps the best handset I’ve used, and a better choice than the competition for the range of jobs I need it for.

I’ll now move onto the biassed part where I cover the things I feel I need in my phone. I’m the first to admit that this is strongly influenced by previous handsets I’ve had – I’m very much of the opinion that when I upgrade my phone, I shouldn’t take a hit for any hardware or software features that I’ve taken for granted from my previous handset (which was a N96 for a few months, preceded by my ever trusted N95).

So, here are the features that ‘make’ the N97 for me (in no particular order)

5mp camera

Years ago I had a ‘proper’ 2mp digital camera, and the decent optics Nokia puts on its handsets have proven to be far superior time and again. Of course, this is a silly comparison, but for quick picture taking, I’ve not been let down since my N95, and I wouldn’t want to take a step back. If an image ends up a little blurry, then I can shrink them and have something perfectly reasonable for a web site (or Facebook, Flickr or wherever). I don’t feel I could get this from a handset with fewer megapixels. More would be nice, as would a more substantial flash, but that would mean sacrificing other features.

Large, high resolution touch screen

I missed the big screen of my 9210. I was jealous of the vibrant, large screen of the iPhone for a while. Looking back through the years at my N96, N95 (original, with the smaller screen), and further to the N70 and even my trusty old 3650 with its odd circular keypad, I don’t know how I coped with such small displays, despite remembering being in relative awe of them at the time.

Further, I’ve longed for a touch screen since my Psion Series 5 (though the n800 kept me quiet about this for a while). Why did they fall out of fashion so much? The opportunity to get a touch screen, with a vibrant display and a full 640 pixel resolution wasn’t one I was going to pass up again. No other handset at this time offers this without sacrificing other features.

Always connected

My service provider deserve some of the credit here for providing me with all the data I can chew on. However, to be able to reach into my pocket and have everything I could ever want from my connected life at my fingertips in seconds is something I don’t know how I’d go without now. From text messaging to Twitter to Facebook to browsing the web to email to anything online. The technology has only improved, and the N97 is probably the best device I’ve had so far in this respect. With a little care to get things set the way I want them, it (relatively) seamlessly hops between 3.5G and the various wireless networks I might be in range of so that I get the speediest connection where I am.

At this juncture I shall add that I let my phone connect whenever it wants with an almost complete disregard for battery life mostly because I charge my phone every night by ritual and plug it into my laptop/desktop whenever I sit down by habit. Sure, I can drain its battery if I really put my mind to it, but day to day use doesn’t come close and my email is always there waiting for me to read.

Media player (with lots of storage and podcast management)

32Gb is more than enough storage for the amount of media I actually want to listen to. Over the years I have collected a significant number of mp3s, but the number I actually want to listen to are far fewer and easily fit into a handful of Gb. Podcasts use up more space, so having plenty to spare is always a plus.

The sound quality is great through the headphones (which I will always be using), and its playlist and podcast management do just fine for my needs. Nokia include headphones with a small remote on the wire for basic media functionality as standard with a lot of devices these days, which is always nice.

Quick and easy PC connectivity

PC Suite does its job pretty well, even if it is still a bit clunky round the edges. But once its installed, I can just plug my phone in and copy content to and from it without more than a few seconds notice. It works fine as a USB device, and is happy to let me use my the storage space to store whatever I want.

I’ve avoided mentioning other handsets by name up until this point, but I feel I must mention here that I loathe having to transfer content to and from (well, not so much from) my iPod. If I work the way Apple wants me to, iTunes ties my hands, insisting on analysing any media I give it awareness of, and it stops me from effectively synchronising content from multiple computers without losing something (or everything) each time. There’s a good reason my iPod contains half a gigabyte of media and several Gb of applications.

Easy working with common file formats

I hear Microsoft are planning to bring mobile Office applications to Symbian next year. However, until then, QuickOffice’s software a very good job for working with Office and PDF files. It’s a shame you have to pay for editing of course (gone are the days of Microsoft Office compatible editors being a standard on Psion/Symbian devices). It’s more of a shame that you have to pay for the PDF viewing functionality after the trial expires. But, it’s all there, and it works. You don’t need to spend ages trawling through an app store trying different things that may or may not cost before finding something that doesn’t quite work.

Tethering

Years ago I was mocked for tethering my laptop to my phone over infrared, using a dial-up networking connection to give myself Internet on the train. It was a painful 10 minute wait to load a simple web page, and the day I tried to connect remotely to my desktop at home was a painful one. And yet now it’s a feature many take for granted, and those that can’t do it are jealous of. Bluetooth or cabled, laptop or netbook, a reasonable speed full-browser experience is always no more than a few seconds away.

Multiple input choices

I originally started this item as ‘one-handed input’, but I feel this would downplay the fact I do value the keyboard, especially for if I want to type more than a few dozen words. However, the ability to tap out a text with one hand, aided by T9 predictive text, is invaluable to me. It’s quicker than messing around with a keyboard in that form factor. My only gripe is that Nokia seem to be trying to make predictive text progressively more clever. On my N96 it seemed ideal – it didn’t ‘forget’ words, and it had a good sense for the words I wanted. On the N97, if I put too many commas in a text message, it often begins to offer me commas instead of full stops for the next couple of texts I type. But, for the most part, it does work just fine.

Overall though, the option of switching between one-handed predictive text input, two handed keyboard input or simply touch screen navigation suits me fine, allowing me to tailor the way I use the device to the situation at hand.

Thumb lock

Gone are the days of having to press one key and another to unlock the device. The thumb lock on the side of the N97 is perfect. It’s resistant enough to not get pressed accidentally, and allows you to instantly unlock the device without multiple key (or screen presses). Anything that allows me to do simple tasks as quickly as possible is good in my books.

Putty

A geeky one here, but having Putty (or some other free SSH software) on my phone is critical to me for connecting to one or two remote servers on the move.

Exchange support

I will remain resistant to Nokia’s latest Messaging tool, but the Exchange integration allows me to work with Email, contacts and calendar in unison with all of the computers I use. I can put a calendar entry onto my phone, and it’ll be on my desktop at work within minutes, and vice versa. I’ll grant you that most devices can manage this these days, of course, often with a little more setup.

Alarm clock

I rely on my phone to wake me up in the morning, it’s as simple as that.

Multitasking

This may seem like a gripe at the iPhone, but I really do need to be able to launch more than one application and switch between them without the first being closed down, even if it is able to save it’s ‘state’ for when I want to go back to it.
To clarify, I agree with reviewers, both positive and negative. No phone out there absolutely excels in every area I would like it to. There is good reason I carry around an iPod touch with me, own a n800 Internet tablet, and regularly take my Asus eee 901 netbook with me. The N97 does, however, single handedly manage more of what I want than the alternatives I was aware of at the time.

As far as scoring the Nokia N97 is concerned, it’s likely to do well. My lifestyle has been influenced by the evolving Symbian operating system and Nokia’s hardware over the years, and when I looked into the N97 and its competition, it was clear that the N97 was ticking the boxes. I’m not sure that Symbian will keep it up though. While still a Nokia device, the N900 lacks Symbian and looks mighty tempting…

So, here are my scores and summary comments…

Nokia N97
Effectiveness	For the jobs I need, it does pretty well. Looking forward to the v20 firmware. Wish Nokia would update the browser though	7
Convenience	Everything I want to do just works, though a few things have fiddly setups needed first (not a lot of autodetection that Apple seem to manage fine). Once set up, everything is seconds and a couple of clicks away.	7
Efficiency	Once familiar, everything is where it needs to be, reliably so.	8
Cost	Lower price tag than many less feature-packed smartphones, though less ‘shiny’ factor to show off for the money. Not cheap off contract though.	7
Average (rounded down)		7