TechImpact / it happens there first

A summation of my thoughts after 2 days hands-on with the Nokia N97.

I wanted to like this phone. First, I spent a lot of money to buy it. I could have bought a new IPhone 3G S and paid AT&T's early termination fee for what the N97 costs. Second, though I had some reservations about a few features I thought should have been part of the phone, I was a fan of my Nokia N95.

Foreshadowing complete, I can't recommend the Nokia N97 right now—to anyone.

The problems with this phone are many, some of which might be fixable through firmware, some of which are probably with the device to stay.

There are a few bright spots that I will cover as well, but overall there are cheaper, better phones available and the N97 doesn't do anything well enough to warrant choosing it over other options.

The Screen: The Nokia N97 is Nokia's second touch screen phone though 'touch screen' might be an overly generous description. Opening the box, I was struck by the presence of a tiny flat plastic object. My initial thought was that Nokia has included some kind of micro-usb memory stick with my purchase, but I quickly deduced that the flat plastic object was a stylus.

Odd I thought it, that any touch screen phone would include a stylus in the modern day and age. I pondered the existence of a small percentage of users so concerned about finger prints on their screens that they would prefer to have to keep up with a tiny stylus. I assumed that Nokia was merely being attentive to customer needs by catering to this small band of OCD personality types.

Wrong. The stylus compensates for what is probably the worst aspect of the Nokia N97, the touch screen. While fairly responsive to pressure from the stylus, attempting to use the with your fingers is frustrating. The screen requires a great deal of pressure and is relatively inaccurate. The tiny scroll bars that are part of the user interface design exacerbate the problem. The N97's touch interface is absolutely pathetic compared to the Palm Pre, IPhone, or G1. This alone is enough to not recommend the device. Seriously, who uses a stylus today? If I want to use a stylus I will buy a Nintendo DS or time travel back to 1998.

An additional problem with the screen is the scan line pattern that appears on lighter backgrounds. It's a detraction from the screen quality.

On the topic of visual quality: Screen transitions were disabled by default when I received my phone. I enabled them and immediately found that they are disabled for good reason—they look terrible and kill the performance on the phone. It's possible that this is something that will be addressed via a firmware update. The transitions are very simple and I can't imagine even the weak processor in the N97 not being able to handle a simple screen fade.

Speaking of the weak processor...

Performance: If you have kept up with the N97 at all, you are aware of the controversy regarding the N97's 434mhz ARM 11 processor. At this point it's difficult to tell how many of the performance problems I have encountered are the result of the underpowered processor and how many are caused by inefficient firmware coding. The sad fact is that most newly released smart phones take a firmware revision or two after release to begin performing to their potential.

It is also a sad fact that the N97 has the weakest processor of any of the smart phones being released currently. The IPhone 3G S clocks in at 600mhz, the HTC Magic at 528Mhz, and the Palm Pre's Cortex A8 is said to be three times faster than the N97 processor. The ARM 11 is not the freshest slice of cheesecake on the freezer shelf.

Either as a result of the processor or firmware, the N97 has numerous performance issues. Navigating application menus causes numerous moments of lag, particularly in the browser. Performance in the two games that ship with the N97 is a significant cause for concern. Spore's simple graphics had a slide show feel to them and the performance of Guitar Hero was bad enough to compromise game play. The N97 also lacks dedicated 3D acceleration. I have doubts about the viability of the N97 as a gaming device, but maybe Nokia and few firmware updates will show me to be uneducated.

Performance was not universally bad. I added the Google Maps application and it ran rather well. Screen rotation (with transitions disabled) was as fast as my IPhone and automatic based on position (unlike my G1).

Stability is also an issue, though that will most likely be addressed in an update. I managed to crash the system six times in the first evening of use. Twice in the browser, a crash in both JoikuSpot and the AP News app, once while using the bluetooth headset that came with my order, and once in the music player.

Browsing: And then there is the browser, a mixed bag of good and bad. On the positive side, the browser was able to render pages that my IPhone, G1, and N95 (obviously) could not (IGN.com for example). A lot of this was the better Flash support available in the N97. On the negative side is the summation of every problem I have mentioned so far.

The browser would freeze and become non responsive at odd times. This would be understandable on a Flash or graphics heavy page—it's a mobile browser after all—but this seem to occur on some pages that had almost nothing but text.

The browser controls are located in a side menu that you display by touching a small arrow at the bottom right of the screen. You will access this menu frequently for navigation and book mark operations. This window was another area of strange behavior. As far as I can tell, the window is supposed to disappear after certain operations (like loading a page). But in many cases it would not disappear or take several seconds to do so.

Scrolling around pages without the stylus was very difficult. The N97 browser supports double tapping to zoom into area of pages, but again thanks to the lousy touch screen this was hit or miss.

A personal pet peeve of mine was the browser's inability to render anything other than the Latin alphabet due to lack of font support for Unicode. As this won't affect many US users of the device, it would not be fair to say this is a flaw, but in my opinion any OS that can not support multiple character sets in antiquated, and it personally causes me an issue due to lack of support for Japanese character sets.

One performance bright spot: The transfer rate to mass memory over USB was very fast -- much faster than the N95. I was able to transfer 2GB of MP3 files in under 10 minutes.

Video and Audio: I converted a 720p video (Star Wars Old Republic: Deceived trailer) to play on the N97 using the Nokia Photos software (yes, the Photos software is used for video management as well; not the most intuitively named software). The conversion was fairly quick and the quality was reasonable with only a few artifacts. The resulting 30FPS, 640x360 video file played flawlessly. I also tested several 320x240 video files which played without problem but I wouldn't imagine the N97 would have any trouble with these files. The scan line pattern was again a problem on any lighter colored area.

The music player is almost identical to the player in the N95 and has no particular strengths or weakness to mention, other than the one occurrence where the program simply refused to play any songs and required a reboot of the phone to work again. It's not in the same league at the music capabilities of the IPhone.

Nokia has the Ovi has a music store available in some countries for many of it's devices, but again, it pales in comparison to Apples ITunes.

The N97 YouTube client listed in 'Applications' (it's really just a link to a web page) is not as good as the YouTube client available from Google for many other phones. By default you will be taken to the mobile version of YouTube, and the quality of clips available here is fairly poor even for web video. The Desktop version, accessible from a link at the bottom of the mobile version, works very well on the N97 and has much better quality. You can even click on the video to view the clip full screen as you can with a desk top browser. I am also guessing it will only be a matter of time before we see the Google YouTube client made available for the N97 (I did not try the N95 client to see if it would still work).

I was not able to play videos from my DNS 323 UPNP media server on the N97, but I have a lot more necessary experimentation before I can say that it doesn't work. The Orb software comes with the Ovi Suite and offers real time transcoding and media sharing capabilities, but I have not tested it yet. Nor have I tested the Nokia Home Media server software.

The N97's also has support for playing music and sound through a bluetooth headset. something not all smart phones can do and a nice capability if you are wanting to watch a video clip when you are out in public and unpacking a set of headphones would be troublesome.

The Camera: The camera is responsive for a camera phone —again, an improvement over the N95—and is arguable one of the phone's strongest features. The amount of time needed to 'lock in' for a shot has decreased from “some what irritatingly slow” on the N95 to “not so bad that I will really notice most of the time” with the N97. I could mention things like “5MP CCD” and “German Optics” but image quality and other real tests of the camera are best left to those that know what they are talking about. From the perspective of a photography idiot I can say that I liked using the phone as a camera and I liked the pictures it took. The addition of a sliding lens cover to protect the lens and flash is very, very welcomed and an advantage the N97 has over most other smart phones.

My enthusiasm for the camera capabilities of the N97 are somewhat squelched by the current availability / imminent release of several smart phones with superior cameras such as the Omnia HD and Nokia's own N86. In what is going to be a reoccurring theme through out these notes: if the camera is that important to you, there are phones that do it better than the N97, and if the camera isn't that important to you, there are better phones than the N97 that do a 'good enough job' at taking pictures.

Build: After several pages of notes essentially trashing the Nokia N97, I find that I can't say enough GOOD things about the design and build of this phone. The build quality of the N97 is good. The slide mechanism works perfectly, possibly too well as I applied too much force the first time I opened the device and nearly dropped the phone to the floor. The tilt screen tilts to a great angle for viewing. I hope the construction continues to hold as well over time.

Looks are always going to be subjective, but I have a hard time understanding how anyone could call this phone 'ugly'. The design is minimalistic, but I am quite fond of the sleek lines and and chrome accents. The phone is much less bulky than I thought it would be after viewing preview videos. It is not as slender as the IPhone, but is still easily 'pocketable'. It has a solid feel, but is not excessively heavy.

The keyboard is tiny but I am comfortable typing short messages and entering URL's with the N97. It took a few hours working with the device to become fully accustomed to the the location of the space bar in the lower right portion of the keyboard. I do have smaller fingers than a lot of people, so your results may vary. The only real negative is the lack of a dedicated row of numbers. It's not the best mobile keyboard I have used, but it's functional. Typing via the software keyboard is an option and the buttons on the software keyboard are large enough to not be hampered by the poor touch screen. The phone does have predictive entry though it is turned off by default.

Software: The Nokia N97's 'Home Screen' is a widget based interface that actually works pretty well depending on which widgets you choose to add to the screen. All of the widgets I tried could be set to 'offline' mode, preventing them from using data services. This tends to invalidate the purpose of some of the widgets, but it's nice to know you have the control. Widgets for social networking will be of great use to those who are serious Facebook users and the like.

Control of access points for software on the N97 'mostly' works well. Access points can be assigned to 'destinations' (groups) and assigned a priority with in that group. For instance, one of the default destinations is 'Internet'. You could add your home Wifi to that destination and set it as a higher priority than the data service for your cell phone plan. Applications on the phone that have their network access point set to 'Internet' will use the Wifi first and then fall back to the data service if the Wifi is not available. I state that access point control 'mostly' works because not all of the applications use this new control scheme. Real Player for instance, does not adhere to this, requiring you to open the Real Player client and manually change the access point before you can watch (non-Flash) video streams from the web browser, for example. I also find it VERY irritating that I can not delete the preinstalled Boingo service from the phone or its first priority assignment in the 'Internet' destination.

The built in Nokia email client is functional. I tested it in IMAP mode against my corporate email server and had no complaints. The email client has a widget that notifies you of incoming email and allows one click access to the email client interface.

JoikuSpot is preinstalled on the N97. JoikuSpot crashed the first time I tried to run it and then asked me to buy the program when I tried to run it again. After manually running the update from within the JoikuSpot program, the nag screen went away, but I am still unable to initiate a 'hot spot' without generating an error.

One of my biggest complaints against the N95 was the lack of a VPN client. I could not find a VPN client on the N97 either. This is a glaring omission that I find completely baffling to the point that I want to believe it's in the phone somewhere and I just haven't found it.

Several other third party applications come preinstalled. The Bloomberg financial application is very good. Some of the applications, such as the Psiloc World Traveller app, have 'coming soon' messages on certain functions, lending more to the impression that the N97's software is not finished.

Ovi is Nokia's app store for its devices. The Ovi store only recently opened and the phone client for Ovi looks unpolished. The Ovi web interface to the store doesn't even list the Nokia N97as a model option right now. There is a very limited selection of applications in the store at this time, and an even more limited selection of free apps.

App stores are going to become progressively more critical to the success of a smart phone. The future of the N97 depends to no small degree on how successful Nokia is at motivating developers to contribute to Ovi. I have my personal doubts as to how successful they will be. As a cell phone developer myself, there seems to little compelling reason to focus development effort on Nokia devices or even Symbian for that matter. IPhone is the obvious leader is the cell phone application market. Blackberry has the corporate market. Android has the most potential, with Android devices coming out from almost every major cell phone manufacturers and even some netbook providers. Being the flagship phone for Sprint, the Palm Pre has to be the dark horse pick.

The Symbian OS is currently going through what will be a long migration to an open source project, and Nokia's market share is dropping. One has to wonder just how many open source cell phone platforms the market needs?

So where does that leave Nokia from a developer's perspective? Larger developers can cover every phone on the market, but many of the best apps come from smaller developers and as a small development organization, you typically only have so much in the way of resources. I see very little reason Symbian development would be at the top of anyone's list.

Cost: Finally it comes down to cost. The N97 is not carrier subsidized and retails for almost $700 (though you can find it cheaper at some online retailers). It's release coincides with the the release of the new IPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre, which are carrier subsidized phones that sell for around $200 with contract. A $200 N97 would be an entirely different story. It might be worth tolerating the inadequacies to take advantage of the few strengths for certain types of users. It's hard to argue this same point for a $700 N97.

The success of the N95 demonstrated that there is a market for more expensive unlocked phones in the US if they have compelling features not provided by carrier sponsored phones. For the N97 to take advantage of this market it would have to be much better than its subsidized competitors, and it just isn't. In many cases the $700 N97 isn't as good as the now $99 IPhone 3G.

...and the N97 definitely does not look competitive compared against other high end unlocked models such as the Omnia HD which retails in the same price ball park at the N97.

In Conclusion: In summation, the N97 is a fairly good multimedia phone with a great build and a good widget interface that is marred by instability, missing features, a poor touch screen, abysmal gaming, and a very expensive price tag.

Again, I can't recommend this phone to anyone right now. I am somewhat surprised that Nokia released a device that is so inadequate in so many areas, particularly given the level of competition, their decreasing market share, and their recent statements that they would start taking a more aggressive stance in the US market.

Possibly with a firmware revision or two this phone will improve, but the cell phone market is not standing still. With each new cellphone release, there becomes less and less of a reason to even consider the Nokia N97.

by Jerry Gamble