Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

Let me start by saying that I cannot say how, who from or where I managed to get hold of the N97 to play with, but I did. It was only for 20 minutes or so, but I can roughly gauge where Nokia is going with this, in terms of functionality and features.

From face value, it looks like your ordinary touch screen phone… except you notice that is seems thicker than the others. This is because there is a full QWERTY keyboard, tucked underneath the screen. In one smooth action, the screen slides out and up at a 45 degree angle. I was checking out the mechanism and it works really well, the fluidity of the slide is a marvel with zero friction. You end up holding the device like a handheld games console in this position, and you can use your thumbs to type. The unit is very solidly built, with a 5 MP camera which has a lens cover.

There is a multi directional pad on the left hand side of the keyboard and the menu button is located within thumb reach on the top half of the phone. As I was flicking through the menus, the response was initially good, however after a few minutes of use there was noticeable lag between button presses. Also, the icons are not yet polished and seem low in quality, so the firmware and the graphics are still in its early stages. I am sure that Nokia will polish this up when the release date draws closer.

I like how it is both button operated as well as with the touch screen, this should cater for pretty much everyone depending on how you use the UI. Unfortunately, with the camera, the picture quality is diabolical. It reminds of an Etch-a-Sketch drawing, so that’s another thing they will be tweaking. The phone also has all the obligatory social functionalities, such as the ease of blogging, chatting, posting pictures and so on. There is also support for widgets to assist and provide links to the above.

In terms of hardware, it will come with 48 GB of storage, wow. The screen is in a 16:8 widescreen aspect ratio for movies and you can share your media with the Nokia Ovi service. 3G/HSDPA is of course supported, as well as memory expandability with a microSD slot. All this really grabs me as something to consider, they want your life to be integrated with this phone by providing you with the hardware/capacity to do this. Movies on the go, music, typing documents, your whole life can be organised on this thing with all the bells and whistles you need for the entertainment side. Additional gizmos include an FM transmitter, built-in GPS chip and an electronic compass. Another nice thing is it uses the standard mini-usb connector for data and charging, no proprietary connections and I hope this is the sign of things to come for all phones.

I was forbidden to take any pictures of it, so I will have to make do with a stock photo. This is definitely THE Symbian phone to watch out for this year, the only downside is its chunkiness but that’s what you get when you cram so much in.

Footnote: I prefer the black version over the white, looks more attractive I think.

Tags: Nokia N97

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.