Nokia N97 review

Nokia is a giant in the mobile phone world, but it has never embraced touchscreen technology with the gusto you might have expected. Even with the arrival and huge success of the iPhone it seemed reluctant to join in, and the Nokia N97 is only its second such phone in recent times.

You can see why, for where the non-touchscreen E71 and E75 handsets are a joy to use, the Nokia N97 is a huge disappointment. The main problem is that S60, the phone’s underlying operating system, was never designed with touch in mind, and the few simple tweaks added here and there don’t turn it into an iPhone beater.

Navigation is frequently counter-intuitive and often inconsistent. Rather than flicking a finger up in a list, as if you were physically manipulating it, you pull down in the same direction as a scrollbar – while browsing the web, it’s reversed. In the meantime, getting to the dial pad is an exercise in mental gymnastics: most places in the OS – on the main menu screens, for example – you simply hit the green touch-sensitive pickup key below the screen, but do this on the home screen and you’re whisked off to your call history; the dialpad shortcut is a soft key in a bar at the bottom of the screen.

As with many Windows Mobile-based touch phones, there’s a litany of places where the finger-friendliness of the N97’s home screen and context menus seems to have been forgotten. Try to change the alarm, for instance, and instead of manipulating settings directly, you have to tap the fields first, then change time or date.

Neither were we impressed with the new, customisable home screen. As with Android-based phones you can arrange the screen to your preference, and there’s a range of modules available. You can choose to display news feeds, a slideshow of your photos or a Facebook widget, and there are loads more to choose from. These can all be dragged around and repositioned but, in traditional S60 style, the results are far from pretty and there’s limited space for them: you can only squeeze five items in below the clock, date and profile selection button in portrait mode.

Text entry ought to be where this phone excels. Push the 3.5in 360 x 640 screen to the right and it kicks up at an angle to reveal a Qwerty keyboard underneath. But while this is better than the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic’s touchscreen-only effort, it’s not as much of an improvement as you’d expect. The keys have little feedback or travel, so it’s hard to know when you’ve typed anything, and the layout is just bizarre, with the spacebar shunted far into the right-hand corner and a five-way directional pad on the left.

Ironically, using the touchscreen would probably be more effective, as the screen on the N97 is both sensitive and accurate – and as you dial numbers or tap out texts using the T9 dialpad it gives a short buzz every time you hit a key – but the onscreen keyboard of the 5800 has been removed here.

Then there’s the build quality and looks, which for a phone intended to be a flagship product, is nothing short of shoddy. The back is thin, flimsy and feels plasticky, the lock switch on the left doesn’t feel well constructed and the screen hinge mechanism, most critically, relies on plastic (not metal struts), which doesn’t fill us with confidence either. Aesthetics are more subjective, but we’d hazard a guess that our review model’s white screen surround trimmed with chrome and matte off-silver rear won’t be many people’s cup of tea. The black model is better, but still far from glamorous.
Elsewhere, the N97’s list of capabilities is immensely impressive. There’s a good quality five-megapixel camera with dual LED flash, a huge 32GB of onboard memory, a 3.5mm headphone jack and good quality sound and smooth video from the phone’s usable media player. You get an FM transmitter that allows you to play your tunes through the speaker of any handy radio – excellent for an impromptu party, or playing music through a car stereo.

Plus, there’s the usual smorgasbord of smartphone technology, including 3.6Mbits/sec HSDPA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, an RDS FM tuner and a front-facing camera for video calls. You get a proximity sensor that allows you to silence a call by flipping the phone over, an accelerometer that rotates the screen orientation without lag, and an ambient light sensor that automatically dims and brightens the screen. You can even use the camera to shoot 30fps VGA video; just don’t expect Flip Mino-rivalling results.

It’s all the more disappointing, then, that the damage has already been done by this point. Way before you get to the handy FM transmitter, high quality camera, decent media player capabilities and no-stone-unturned features list, the N97’s usability issues stamp their muddy great boots all over your nice, clean smartphone fun.

It’s also worth pointing out, at this point, that battery life is no more than average. We eked a mere two days out of the phone in our light use test – some way short of the best phones on the market, which can get to four days and more.

The unavoidable fact is that this phone’s touchscreen OS is frustrating and confusing, and as a package it doesn’t add up. Its mid-range looks and feel mean it can’t challenge the likes of the iPhone or HTC’s best handsets, and one of its key selling points – the keyboard – simply isn’t good enough.