Camera Phones Plaza

I can say that Nokia N97 is one of the most complete terminals that are now available on the market. One of the qualities that make N97 a great phone is the ingenious design (at a first look it is just a touchscreen phone but, the bottom slides-out under the display to discover a full QWERTY keyboard). We will now see what this phone can do in the following Nokia N97 review.

With the soft keys at the bottom, you can forget that you look at a new terminal. The application can do almost anything you want with your files - move, copy, rename, sorting or sending. You can also protect your memory card with a password, if deemed necessary. The search for a particular file or directory is available and very intuitive.

The gallery of Nokia N97 is a part of the interface that was not changed radically compared to Symbian's non-touch predecessors. This has no 3D view, or customizable slideshow that I have seen in the N series. The only difference is the touch-friendliness plus. In fact, the gallery is one of the few places in the interface where gestures of "sweeping fingers" are allowed. This means you can see the pictures (and videos as well) by walking the finger on the screen. The zoom on an image is controlled either through the volume control key or through a slider touch on-screen. In all other cases, images are displayed in full screen. Generally, browsing images is done relatively fast, but zooming is pretty slow. It takes about one second for each step of zooming, even when it comes to 3 Megapixel images, not to mention the largest.

The music player (same as on the 5800 XpressMusic) is similar to the versions on the S60 3rd edition. It has some small cosmetic changes and only the touch optimization distinguishes it. I do not say that the player is not capable enough - it certainly has more than enough features. However, some more appearance improvements were welcomed. However, the touch interfaces are meant to be fun and useful at the same time, but also eye pleasing. The music library is, of course, automatically sorted by artist, album, genre and composer and the search for songs is done by typing its name. You can also create your own list of songs in the shortest time. The process of adding songs to the library is as simple as choosing the refresh option. You will not need to do this, if you loaded music via PC Suite. Watching a video on Nokia N97 is generally a pleasure, thanks to the large display. The video player has a decent functionality but it accepts only a very limited number of codecs, not DivX and XviD. The video player works only in fullscreen mode (landscape mode). The large screen size is more than welcome, and so you can really enjoy your videos

The FM radio looks very good. It has a neat and simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in the area where you are. It supports RDS and it has automatic scanning for alternative frequencies. This means that if you are on the move, N97 will deal with automatic switch to the selected radio station frequencies.

Nokia N97 has a 5 MP camera, with a maximum resolution of 2592x1944 pixels. The Carl Zeiss features optics and the dual-LED flash promise better pictures with many details. The UI of the camera is similar to that of 5800 XpressMusic - the few changes made are not necessarily better. All settings are gathered in a common menu, except the flash, which has its own shortcuts. We understand that a tabular layout is not the easiest to work on such devices, but some of the most important features could have their own shortcuts. At least the range of settings that Nokia N97 offers is quite extensive: from setting manual white balance and ISO color to exposure compensation, shadows and contrast. Various effects are also available, grouped in color tones. Unlike the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which needs a firmware update for this purpose, N97's geo-tagging for the camera phone is available. Nokia's N97 lacks all modern features such as face detection, smile detection and blink prevention - not to mention the image changes or other facilities like this.

The quality of the videos shot with N97 is OK. Other producers already offer better picture quality at higher resolution - Samsung, for example, with the 8300 UltraTOUCH or even Omnia HD. Not to mention the 120 fps and slow-motion clips, which are already standard issue on the high-end phones from LG and Samsung. The quality is still a very good, but for a 5 megapixel camera phone. A 5 megapixel camera is no longer regarded as a high technology camera, not to mention the lack of the well-known facilities, as I mentioned earlier. Video recording is another area where Nokia has made a progress over the past few years.

The smartphones are usually rich in terms of connectivity. Nokia N97 makes no exception: all modern means of data transfer are supported. Bluetooth and USB are present in version 2.0 with A2DP support, and UPnP support. There is no shortcut for Wi-Fi manager, but it can be easily found in the Connectivity menu and after that connecting to a wireless network is just two steps away. All types of network connectivity are available to the user - GPRS, EDGE and 3G with HSDPA. Finally, Nokia N97 has a memory card slot, which can usually have the fastest data transfer rates and can support memory cards with up to 16GB. Nokia N97's web browser is about the same as 5800's XpressMusic, which brings us no joy. A great browser indeed, but it is not properly optimized for touch. Your web browser has full support for Flash and Java, which means you can enjoy Flash videos directly from your browser, without using mobile versions of sites like YouTube. Therefore, in general, the second S60 touch-browser is well equipped, but fails to satisfy the ergonomic needs.

Nokia N97 comes with a built-in GPS receiver and judging by our experience, it is a very sensitive unit, but nothing spectacular. It managed to get a satellite receiver lock from the start in about 5-7 minutes on the first attempt (A-GPS is turned off in time). The good resolution of the screen sounds like a serious premise for a reasonable use as a dedicated navigation device. Unfortunately, N97 has only three months probation for the voice guided navigation, so you have to pay if you want more. The phone comes with Nokia Maps 2.0 Touch preinstalled. As you probably guessed, this is not a touch version of the standard Nokia Maps 2.0. It offers free extensive maps coverage, but you have to pay for most of the other functions, such as traffic information and city guide. It has four different ways of viewing, including satellite and hybrid maps. All you need is an Internet connection. The route planning algorithm is also quite easy to be customized to match your preferences best. Route selection can be set to either fastest or shortest. The application is also usable for pedestrian navigation or you can close the GPS receiver and use the phone as a simple map.

Unfortunately, from what we found out from this Nokia N97 review, I can say that this phone is not exactly what you expect from a world leader in production of mobile phones. The terminal is clearly surpassed by the other smartphones in the same segment. And when we say clearly, we refer to the 12 MP camera on the Sony Ericsson Idou, the advanced features of the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD, the huge display on the HTC HD.