Nokia N 97

It might have been all about the likes of Android and Apple with the HTC Magic or the Apple iPhone 3G / iPhone 3GS over the last year or so, but it's important we don't forget that Nokia is still top of the pile, and has sought to maintain that lead by bringing out another flagship handset, so we bring you the Nokia N97 review.

The N97 is essentially laid out to be a mini-UMPC, with a slide out screen nestling at a roughly 40 degree angle on top of a full QWERTY keyboard.

Sliding it up and down feels solid and very satisfying; in fact, it's easy to see that a few people will probably end up breaking the N97's screen as they'll simply be idly flipping it up and down all the time.

Even still, it feels like it would be a while before you did that with the Nokia N97, such is its build quality.

The chrome rim around the whole handset is a nice (if fingerprint attracting) touch, and the whole thing feels solid and stable in the hand, and the massive internal 32GB memory (which can be supplemented up to 64GB with a microSD card) gave us the feeling we had a powerhouse on our hands.

It's obviously going to be once again compared to the likes of RIM's general BlackBerry range (despite Nokia's extensive E-series competition) thanks to the keyboard, as well as the Apple iPhone 3G and the HTC Magic, just by the fact that it's a high end touchscreen device with a QWERTY input.

In fairness, it's probably more iPhone than BlackBerry, as it clearly doesn't have email at the heart, but is more to fulfil the needs of the consumer who likes to message a fair bit as well as multi-task.

It seems a little chunky, which is strange considering it's only 15.9mm thick.

You obviously have to accept a fair amount of depth to the handset if you're after a QWERTY keyboard, but there's a notion that this still feels a little large and creates something of a protrusion from the average pocket.

The lock key is a slider on the left hand side of the phone, which quickly brings the phone in and out of sleep mode, and is one of the better options we've seen to do so, especially as it gives a satisfying buzz when activating and deactivating.

We're certainly very glad that Nokia has made the clever decision to add a 3.5mm headphone jack onto the phone, especially with the depth that's just been mentioned giving it no excuse not to get the drill out.

It's well placed at the top of the device, although being further to the right or left would probably have made it more comfortable in the hand.

In the box there are the usual suspects, albeit devoid of the 3.5mm adaptor, which is a lovely reminder that you're not going to have to fork out for loads of replacements in the future.

The new charger with the USB connector is obviously included but if you're like most others on the planet you'll have around 50 legacy Nokia chargers and there's an adaptor for both the old and the older chargers in the box too, which is a really nice touch.

Talking of which Nokia's excellent hands free kit and less excellent headphones are included in the box, as well as a screen wiper for when you get your mucky paws all over the shiny and scratch-resistant touch screen.

Nokia has rehashed its Symbian S60 OS for the fifth time on this handset (and also the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic) but has sadly decided against making any wholesale changes, which is a shame as it means the lag and general bugginess of navigation through the handset is still very much apparent.

That's not to say we're talking the same fail rate of the first N95 or the N96, but there's a definite sensation that the Nokia N97 still falls some way short of the noted slickness of the HTC Magic or the Apple iPhone.

This could be partly down to using a less-than-500MHz processor on board this mini-computer, where the lack of power is horribly apparent at times and makes you wish that the designers had picked up a Snapdragon processor in the building process.

With a 1GHz effort under the hood it's easy to imagine the Nokia N97 would be able to whizz through almost any task with aplomb.

The new home screen, designed specifically for the Nokia N97, has elements of the 5800 XpressMusic about it (ie being able to select four favourite contacts) but has added in a great number of widgets to choose from, which automatically re-align themselves from landscape to portrait as necessary.

The default widgets (Email, Facebook, Accuweather, shortcuts, favourite contacts and clock function) are a decent selection, and can be added to with a whole range of items, from a news feed index to extra contacts to a miniaturised music player.

There are also those like an Amazon widget, which seems to only display random items as a hyperlink, and are a bit less useful. But overall, a nice selection that it's a shame you can't add to, and we'd like to think there's a chance that Nokia will extend the range on offer in future firmware updates and the like.

However, the default widgets, which are also the first thing that people will see when turning the phone on for the first time, are a little unpredictable and prone to error.

For instance, the Accuweather function flitted between showing excellent weather updates for our current location and not being able to load at all, with a strange mangled graphic thrown in every so often for good measure.

Similarly, the Facebook application, which showed messages and friend requests as well as status updates, frequently decided to log us out of our account, no matter how many times we requested to go back in and look at our full profile in the mobile version of the social network, as well as opting to show a portion of the home screen when in landscape mode, which looks frankly amateur for a phone of this potential.

The menu screen has evolved nicely over the time Nokia have been mass producing mobile phones and is still laid out nicely in the grid system many other manufacturers have mimicked over the years.

A little spinning disc next to an icon means that it's running in the background, and the interface has been cleaned up for the S60 5th edition with fewer icons on the main menu page, although we're a little perplexed as to why the calendar is one of them.

We can only assume that Nokia's research showed it that the main demographic for this phone would be using it to make a lot of dates and meetings, otherwise it would have been better served by putting a video player or similar there instead.

The applications section in the bottom left of the screen is where all downloaded programs from the newly created Ovi Store now live, which means that it can quickly become cluttered with different applications.

The Apple iPhone obviously brings a similar navigation system to the party, but we had hoped that Nokia would have found a more efficient way of searching through the plethora of applications we would be looking for.

The touchscreen on the Nokia N97, despite being resistive, is faster and more responsive than that found on the 5800 XpressMusic, with clear presses enabled from the off thanks to larger and wider buttons.

Each menu comes complete with its own virtual scroll bar at the side, and despite being slim it's surprisingly easy to 'grab'and slide up and down, so menu navigation is blindingly simple on the Nokia N97.

Anyone that's played with a Nokia phone before knows how to call and use contacts, as it's among the most rudimentary methods of finding your friends on the phone that there is.

First of all, the 'favourite contacts' tab on the home screen gives instant access to your buddies with a picture attached. In the default theme this uses a black font to write the name of each person across the photograph, which means most of the time you can't read the label.

However, with them being a favourite you probably don't need it, but still it's rather irritating. Changing themes sorts the problem out, but it's another 'out of the box' faux pas for the Nokia N97.

The same favourites are listed at the top of the contacts screen, where users can either type in the name of the person they're searching for, or scroll down using the slide bar at the side.

Both methods allow you to find the person you're after pretty easily, although if you have over 200 contacts in the phone book you'll struggle to use the slide bar to land accurately on the right person.

Each person is neatly laid out with simple icons to call, message or video call the person, as well as a group effort should they belong to another set of users on the phone.

Call quality is a little less impressive however, with nearly all the calls we made on the test handset not connecting the first time despite having more than enough signal. This seemed like a teething problem at first but then developed into a full-time raging issue, as trying to make a call took at least two or three minutes more than it was meant to.

Also, if you answer the phone when slid open, it automatically defaults to speaker mode. While this is a useful feature, most of the time you'll want to talk normally on the phone, so you have to slide it shut before you can answer the call.

The aforementioned lag on the new S60 system means that you have to wait around two seconds before you can answer the phone after shutting the handset, which again is irritating.

The call and terminate buttons are touch sensitive, which adds an elegant sleekness to the phone but can be murder to hit accurately half the time, even with haptics turned up to full blast.

The menu button is thankfully raised, but you always have to look to see where your fingers are when using the green and red buttons, again adding time to the calling process.

As you can imagine, messaging is where the phone comes to the fore. While the QWERTY keypad might be a little more flush and ever so slightly smaller than other efforts, it's still very easy to hit with average sized hands, and within minutes we were typing at around 60% speed compared to a normal keyboard, which is excellent for a mobile phone.

However, others that tried the keyboard were less impressed, stating that it was harder to hit the keys and the flush nature of the keyboard made it harder to find the right button each time, but there was likely an element of getting used to a new system as most of the people surveyed had barely used a QWERTY keyboard on a phone before.

Messaging on the Symbian S60 system is pretty much the same fare as it ever has been before.

Simple keys at the side to send messages, add contacts and attach files are a nice effort to add a bit of functionality to proceedings, and the general day to day texting was easy and simple to do, even with one hand when on a crowded train (although we did nearly elbow someone in the face when flicking it open).

Emailing, which was among the easiest to set up as we only needed to put in our Gmail address and password, was less of a pleasant experience after initialisation, with slow updating of the inbox and no HTML option to speak of making only the most basic of emailing possible.

Composing an email was nice and straightforward though, being very similar to the method of writing an SMS / MMS.

Email was seemingly only updated once we went in and looked at the inbox, being prompted to connect to the mailbox to check for updates.

However, despite turning the feature on the first day we got the handset, the option to auto-update the inbox decided to start working after three days... perhaps we inadvertently altered some settings to start the process, but it was going to be a major black mark to have the email on the home screen but not to update every 15 minutes or so.

As you can imagine on a high resolution widescreen mobile phone, the internet experience was a real pleasure in both portrait and landscape modes, especially using the previously excellent Symbian internet browser.

Using the phone to navigate the web in both 3G and Wi-Fi modes was virtually indistinguishable thanks to the speed of loading, which was doubly impressive when you consider the comparatively slow processor on board beneath the shiny exterior.

Pages like the BBC mobile website and Wikipedia appeared superbly fast on the screen, and even heavier mobile sites that use a lot of Flash animation in adverts loaded much faster than we were expecting.

Navigation was also of a similar standard to other phones, with double tapping to zoom in as well as a simple touch-and-scroll method of moving around the pages. And if that wasn't enough for some people, it's also possible to use the D-pad on the QWERTY keyboard to scroll around for accuracy, with the central button used for clicking links.

It might have been nice to see that central button used as an optical trackpad, like that seen in the Samsung i8510, but it's possible that we're just being greedy in asking for that AND a touchscreen.

However, one of the annoying things about the internet was the inability to reload without going through a whole mess of menus.

In the past with the S60 browser it was possible to simply click and hold anywhere on the screen to bring up a set of quick functions, and despite being able to do so in other applications it's been stripped from this browser.

It's hardly a dealbreaker for a phone with an excellent internet effort, but still it's always confusing when a company removes something useful.

On the outside, the camera looks decent if unspectacular, with another Carl Zeiss lens (and a pretty spiffy dual LED flash) beneath a slide-out screen to protect the snapper and also start the camera (in a similar vein to the Sony Ericsson C905) although as you can see from the pictures below, this still quickly filled up with dust and fluff.

The interface on the camera looks like it's simple with very little functionality, but once you press the menu button a whole host of options present themselves to you.

Users can change almost all settings, from ISO to exposure as well as having a grid placed on top to take better snaps which gave a nice camera-rich experience.

The video camera is a little bit more bog standard, but thanks to the 32GB of internal memory you can record nearly two hours of DVD-like footage from the handset.

Why you'd want to is beyond us, as for that long you'd probably just buy a camcorder, but we never like to turn down options here on TechRadar.

Here's how the Nokia N97 fared against an Olympus SP-565UZ camera in our like-for-like picture test:

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

The Olympus obviously performs much better than the N97 thanks to being a higher end, dedicated camera, but the N97 still fares well in overcast longer shots.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

With a bright background, the N97 manages to maintain macro focus while keeping the background roughly in shot. However, it's powerless to prevent the light bleeding through, while the Olympus manages to keep things sharp and colours vivid.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

The difference between the two cameras here is both startling and captures the essence of how a cameraphone differs from a dedicated snapper.

The fire and scene is much easier to see with the N97, but the Olympus is much more the device you want when you're trying to 'properly' photograph a fire scene with wildly varying brightness levels.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

In perhaps the most stark contrast between the two devices, the Nokia N97 cannot even come close to matching the Olympus for clarity, sharpness and detail, instead letting the minimal light 'wash-out' the whole picture.

The Nokia N97

Olympus SP-565UZ

Night imaging, despite using a dual LED flash, is never going to beat a decent Xenon effort as clearly shown here. Colour reproduction and scene light equality is of varying quality for the Nokia N97, but is clear as day with the Olympus.