Nokia's N97, well done Nokia
Nokia did well with the announcements of Nokia World. Biggest news in mobile town being the N97. It has all a n-series phone needs: Wopping battery life, 5MPixel photo, 30 fps 640x480 Video and all the trimmings of the N95-class phones. I have only three complaints.
- No Xenon flash, let's be honest. Dual led for video simply sucks, and it pales completely in comparison with xenon flash for photo's. At least the current dual led models do. And it will be a while until they get that right it seems.
- 12 cm's long? Okay to be precise 11,7 cm. Still it's a bit to clumsy. A smartphone that is not pocketable is not a smartphone, its a netbook/laptop/fancy piece of heavy luggage.
- 150 grams? Another pocketable size complaint. 120 grams please at the most 130 grams.
With the new Symbian v5 touchscreen software, Maps, Ngage and the social contact integration on the standby screen it looks like a winner. Early adopters of the N95 like me will pine about this machine until it's available. Still I think it's current size and weight will make people hesitate to buy it. Time will tell wether the N97 will position itself for as a E90 replacement for buisinessmen or as a anytime, anyplace phone for a larger group of smartphone addicts.
Having said all this I would love to test this phone and see if it can cope with one of my 14x16 hours trips of satnav, e-mail, phototagging and videorecording. It killed the last two N95 I owned, despite being never dropped. All in all it is pretty close to my personal wish list for Christmas, though it seems Santa will be half a year late ;-)
Nokia
The N97 will likely be the most expected phone for the first half of 2009. Supplemented with the new maps and e-mail integration into OVI. Nokia seems more back on track than ever. The new social contact integration on the homescreen of the N97 could very well indicate further developments in the new Symbian OS. Gearing it more towards the social demands an internetconnected junk has. Like multiple internet identities and syncing per identity as well simple things like as being allowed to cloudtag your e-mail. Who has ever properly used the subject line in an e-mail?
Comments
nahhhh. 7 months are very far:-).
I think this is the beginning of the end.
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/12/02/the-smoke-has-cleared-and-the-dust-has-settled-our-take-on-the-nokia-n97/#more-10453
To be honest, I am almost a bit disappointed after all the hype. I would really like to have a Nokia phone as my main phone again, but the N97 won't be it. Will have to stick to my iPhone/E71 combination for a while longer I guess.
Oh, and something else: have you had the chance to try the 5800 touch screen yet? I would be very curious to hear what you think and how it compares to the iPhone touch screen.
I own a N800 with touchscreen which supports dual tumb typing. There is a nice post from me about the typing speeds. The main advantage of qwerty versus touch typing is not the speed (little difference) but the larger screen space for message composition. Editing spreadsheets, documents and larger e-mails fares much better when using a larger screen. Even T-9 on an regular mobile phone is then better suited for message composition than a touchscreen. So yes.
I definitely want QWERTY and 5 Mpixels with a shutter on a next phone. It seems the two most desired hardware items at the moment.