Nokia N97 Review

Available in Black or White, the N97 is more a mobile computer than a mobile phone. Packed with every imaginable feature, Nokia's designers have succeeded in creating a device that is supremely powerful yet easy to use, with a user-friendly touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. With music, video, photos, email, web and downloadable apps all easily accessible from the customisable home page, the N97 delivers everything that we could ask for on the move. However, it's big, heavy and expensive, and has the usual freezing/crashing problems that come with NSeries phones.

Nokia N97 Review from CNET

The good: The Nokia N97 features a touch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, and 32GB of internal flash memory. The smartphone also offers 3G support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS and comes equipped with a 5-megapixel camera.
The bad: The N97's touch user interface isn't well integrated and can be inconsistent and confusing, especially compared with the competition. We would have preferred a capacitive touch screen instead of resistive.
The bottom line: While the Nokia N97 is packed with features and offers the freedom of an unlocked phone, its clunky touch interface, sky-high price tag, and outdated operating system make it hard to recommend when there are better touch-screen smartphones on the market.

Nokia N97 Review Video from PhoneArena

Nokia N97 Review from GSMArena

Key features

• Slide-n-tilt 3.5" 16M-color resistive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with dual-LED flash and lens cover (VGA@30fps video recording)
• Symbian OS 9.4 with S60 5th edition UI
• Slide-out three-row full QWERTY keyboard
• ARM 11 434MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM
• Quad-band GSM support and 3G with HSDPA support
• Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS (plus 3 months of free voice-guided navigation via Ovi Maps)
• Digital compass
• Class-leading 32GB onboard storage
• microSD card slot with microSDHC support
• Built-in accelerometer
• 3.5 mm audio jack
• TV out
• Stereo FM Radio with RDS, FM transmitter
• microUSB port and stereo Bluetooth v2.0
• Web browser has full Flash and Java support
• Nice audio reproduction quality

Main disadvantages

• The S60 5th edition UI still has poor ergonomics and is not as thumbable as expected
• Camera features are so two-thousand-and-late
• No DivX or XviD support out-of-the-box
• No smart dialing
• Somewhat limited 3rd party software availability
• No office document editing (without a paid upgrade) 

Nokia N97 Review from Mobile-Phones-UK

The N97 is much more than an enhanced N96 - it has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen display. Other features include a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, GPS, WiFi and 32GB memory. Nokia claim that it is the "most powerful, multi-sensory mobile computer in existence". Throw away your laptops, guys, the N97 is here!

There are so many touchscreen phones on the market these days, it's tempting to think that they are all the same. But the Nokia N97 does offer more than most. Nokia seem to be positioning the N97 less like a mobile phone and more like a handheld computer. Although at Mobile Phones UK, we tend to be sceptical about a lot of stuff, we're actually genuinely impressed by the N97 design concept. The N97 has both a touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard makes typing fast and easy, and we definitely prefer this to a virtual keyboard (although it isn't the best keyboard ever - it's too wide for comfort, and the space key is in the wrong place.) Whether it's texting, e-mailing or writing notes, the QWERTY keyboard makes things possible that we simply wouldn't have bothered to attempt on an old-style mobile. But it's the touchscreen that will demand most of your attention. The screen measures 3.5 inches across, which makes it the same as the Apple iPhone 3G S, but it has a higher resolution than the iPhone, at a massive 640 x 360 pixels. With this resolution, there are almost as many pixels on this pocket-sized device as there were on early personal computers. And that makes it possible to start thinking about the N97 as if it were a handheld PC, which is exactly what the engineers at Nokia have done. The touchscreen is of resistive type, similar to the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, not quite up to iPhone standards, but pretty slick nonetheless. It's not quite as responsive as the best of the best, and the menus are sometimes slow to respond - typical of previous Nseries phones. The biggest problem is that the user interface feels like it's Symbian with touchscreen functionality bolted on - which is exactly what it is - rather than a native touchscreen OS such as Android, Windows Mobile or Apple's OS X.

The home screen of the phone is information-packed and fully customisable. You can simultaneously view the date & time, your inbox, the weather forecast, RSS feeds, Facebook and quick links to your favourite web pages. This is similar to Samsung's widget interface appearing on phones like the Samsung Jet and the i8910 HD. Touch a web icon and web pages open up in their full glory, with easy touch controls to scroll and zoom. There's full support for Flash videos as well. It's the mobile internet as it should be, and once you've experienced it you won't want to go back to how things used to be. The internet is fast too, either using the 3G HSDPA connection, and even faster is the WiFi connection, where it's available.

The N97 has a built-in GPS receiver, and you can use this to find your location, to geo-tag photos and to navigate. Nokia Maps is supplied, plus multimedia city guides and there's a built-in compass feature too. A 3-month trial licence for pedestrian and voice-guided drive navigation software is included.

The N97 has plenty of custom apps available too. Built on the mature Symbian operating system, there are plenty of apps that will be suitable for the N97, and you can download applications, games, videos and content through Nokia's Ovi store.

Nokia haven't taken this opportunity to upgrade their camera though. It's the same old 5 megapixel camera that appeared in the Nokia N96. But that's not a complaint - the camera is a good one, with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and a dual LED flash.

The N97 really is a feature-packed phone. It's much more like a laptop in terms of its capabilities. We're not going to list everything that it does, because the list would be too long! See the detailed spec below for further info. Suffice to say that it can handle pretty much any kind of media and communications that you can think of. With its close integration with the internet, it feels very much like the 21st century has arrived. We just want to mention the enormous 32GB of onboard memory, plus the ability to increase this with a 16GB memory card.

Nokia's battery life figures are very impressive when you consider what this device is capable of. With 6 hours of talktime on a 3G network and up to 430 hours of standby, this is as much as we could have hoped for. We don't yet have any real world data on this, but hopefully our user reviews below will help to clarify this.

Finally, we have to comment on the size of the device. Yes, it's big, but what did you expect? It's heavy too, but there's a lot of stuff inside! This is a phone that does its best to pack in every feature that users might want, and we think that it's succeeded. Is it the best phone ever? It's probably Nokia's best phone, but at its heart the Symbian operating system feels dated compared to the slickness and speed of the iPhone, or the power of Windows Mobile phones such as the HTC Touch HD or Samsung Omnia. And just like all previous NSeries phones, reliability is a huge problem - expect your N97 to freeze and crash from time to time. We would definitely recommend the N97 for NSeries fans looking for an upgrade, but fans of other smartphone operating systems will probably prefer to stick to what they know. You might also check out the Nokia N97 Mini.