Nokia N97 user experience This is my honest experience of using N97. I have not covered the areas which did not bother me. So anybody wanting to add stuffs are welcome. The Good
Multi-tasking (Dont know how many of us will use this).
Good build quality and the form factor is spot on.
Good for Video and Photos with 640×360 pixels(blows the iphone away). Should credit Carl Zeiss for a great lens.
Memory is 32GB and expandable (GOOD Keep it up Nokia).
Good battery life and battery is replaceable if needed (not like iphone where you should carry a charger if you are a heavy user)
Awesome audio quality. Plays MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA (iPod does not play WMA).
Good quality video playback (MPEG4, 3GP, H.264, WMV, RealVideo 7,8,9/10 TV-out support (PAL/NTSC))
Good builtin speakers.
Maps are good. (Thanks to Nokia owning Navteq) The Bad
Only RAM 128MB
Processor 434 MHz - still lacks a lot of clocks. Here are a few Smartphone clock speeds for comparison
BlackBerry Bold – 624MHz
HTC Magic – 528MHz
HTC Touch Pro2 – 528MHz
Palm Pre – 600MHz (can be overclocked to 800MHz or 1GHz)
iphone 3GS – 600MHz (seems overclocked old CPU)
Samsung i8910 – 600MHz
Using the UI seems like a prison sentence. Nokia still thinks you need to use the menu for most of the things like copy and paste even in a touch screen phone(My 5 year old Windows mobile was better).
Cannot copy and paste numbers with pause and wait . Eg. i had a number 232323pp213423423, which was not allowed to be pasted into the contacts as it has a character in it, but i can type the same in using the phone keypad. Funny but that is what happens.
Inconsistency in UI (Some taps are single click and some are double click. You get frustrated often.)
Cannot view numbers from call logs if you have the caller in phonebook.
For eg, If you get a call from someone and after the call you want to know the number he is calling from, the call logs does not show it. You will need to navigate to the phone book.(So So irritating).
Nokia tells that you can have the application links in the home page. When i try to add messaging(I am referring Messaging, not new Message) or calculator, I cannot.
I can keep on going about UI, i will better stop here.
The spec says that the phone has a orientation sensor, but the phone only changes orientation when the keyboard is slid out. If you drive around with GPS, you are forced to have the phone vertical. Changing orientation does nothing. If you use keyboard for typing then close it and return to do something with the screen, you will find the screen switched off (This is a bug introduced in new Firmware(V11) and is quite annoying. Old firmware(V10) was rubbish anyway.) Nokia's software.
Nokia has gone for a modular approach. It has OVI suite, Nokia Software updater, Nokia Map Loader and Nokia Map Updater all separate doing their own things. Having these many different modules seem to be a bit on the complicated side of things by having a few start-up programs instead of one. I tried disabling the start-up programs and then enabling them again. It just broke itself and would not recognise my phone. So had to uninstall and reinstall all softwares again.
As a tech guy i find it a bit frustrating every now and then using the software as they are not user friendly, and to mention help is not that helpful. Nokia's software in my view is not for an average user. For example to install maps, you need to download and install Nokia map loader. Then download and install Nokia Maps updater to download and install maps. I don't find it explained anywhere where and what to do. Ovi online store
OVI is a joke, forget it. Visit iTunes store to know how an online store should be. What Nokia should fix
Single software like iTunes to do all stuffs and make the software simple to use.
Revamp the whole UI and make it a pleasant experience.
When using GPS the phone struggles. At least 256MB of RAM and 600MHz would have been ideal. Featured i think N97 should have had.
1) Touch Screen (Still Resistive, I would have preferred capacitive like the Iphone)
2) Play OGG, FLAC and MKV... (Without this we again need to get a cowan/archos to play good quality audio/video inspite of spending 38 thousand (price while writing this)).
3) Web browsing is a bit tatty. A full blown browser would have been better.
4) I would have preferred a OLED screen with 720p display. Conclusion
N97 does a good job with social networking sites with its widgets. It also does good job with mail sync with exchange. Overall it is a Smartphone which swings more towards the phone side.
I think nokia has a winning design here which is let down massively by the UI, PC softwares and Online store. If they bring Android or change their symbian os to match iPhone or Palm Pre, N97 has a chance.
Last edited by ksethuram : 4th August 2009 at 19:55.
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