Nokia’s True iPhone Killer real touch screen magic by nokia better then 5800 & N96
So, guess what Nokia came up with as a follow up for their Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Touchscreen phone? The Nokia N97, a Google G1 phone look-alike that sports a 3.5 inch touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
Design
The Nokia N97 looks like a cross between a lot of different phones from the iPhone to the Google G1 Phone to the AT&T Tilt (HTC TyTN II). Up front, the Nokia N97’s 3.5 inch screen dominates the whole front of the phone except for the little button on the bottom left side corner which serves as the shortcut key to the N series multimedia applications. The call and end buttons are touch sensitive like ROKR E8. On the top of the Nokia N97 is the 3.5mm headphone jack and the power button. The Nokia N97 is just a tad bit larger and thicker than the iPhone and when you slide out the QWERTY keypad, you’re reminded of the HTC TyTN II with it’s angled screen. The Nokia N97 feels solid enough to hold though it just feels a bit too large especially if you have small hands. The QWERTY keypad is evenly spaced and you won’t have trouble typing nor would you have to worry about pressing two buttons at a time. The buttons are very minimal compared with other QWERTY keypads from HTC or Blackberry. I guess this is to make room for the directional pad on the left side. The sliding mechanism feels solid enough though I’m a bit worried about the hinge that connects the screen and the keypad since it looks thin and breakable.
Features and Performance
The performance of the Nokia N97 is based purely on the demo version but I have to say I’m quite impressed. It looks like Nokia has fine tuned the Symbian OS to work well with touchscreen. On the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, you won’t get much of the swiping and flicking finger action but they’ve refined it so that you can get that much out of the Nokia N97. Also, compared with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic demo version, the Nokia N97 interface is quite fast and responsive. You can barely see any hiccup on the accelerometer transition or when you’re navigating the Symbian OS. The user interface on the Nokia N97 is also quite new but is still very user-friendly. Like I said, it’s touch optimized and there are a lot of widgets you can play with. The built-in browser also looks promising though I wasn’t able to see if it supports YouTube desktop PC version. Scrolling through webpages isn’t as smooth and fluid as when you’re surfing the Safari Browser on the iPhone but the webpages renders quickly though I don’t know if that’s because the pages that the person demonstrating the phone is already saved and bookmarked on the phone’s memory.
The Nokia N97 also supports TV Out, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, GPS, FM radio, and a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. If the camera on the Nokia N97 is as good as that on the Nokia N95 then I’m sure that the Nokia N97 won’t have any problems when it comes to its camera software. The Nokia N97 runs on Quadband GSM networks and supports 3G/HSDPA.
It’s just too bad that Nokia decided to go with Resistive touchcreen instead of capacitive like that on the iPhone. I’m sure with a bit of development, they’ll be able to come up with a lot of good applications that can make use of capacitive touchscreen.
Outlook
Hmm, looks like Nokia got it right on their second try. I like the Nokia N97 better than their Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and I hope that they’ll be able to incorporate the user interface of the N97 on the 5800 XpressMusic though I highly doubt that since the Nokia N97 is aimed at the high end market while the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic borders on the midrange to high-end phone segment. From the looks of the demo version, the Nokia N97 looks promising enough. It’s fast and responsive. I don’t know what processor or RAM they’ve used on this device but I guess they were able to make use of the new Symbian OS. All in all, it looks like the iPhone, Google G1 Phone and the Blackberry Storm has a new competitor to watch out for. And knowing that there are a lot of Nokia fanatics, I think that the Nokia N97 will definitely take a large part of the smartphone market.
Here’s Specifications:
General 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100
Announced 2008, November
Status Coming soon. Exp. release 2009, Q2
Size Dimensions 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9-18.3 mm
Weight 150 g
Display Type TFT touchscreen, 16M colors
Size 360 x 640 pixels, 3.5 inches
- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Full QWERTY keyboard
- Handwriting recognition
Ringtones Type Polyphonic (64 channels), MP3
Customization Download
Vibration Yes
- Stereo speakers
Memory Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Detailed, max 30 days
Card slot microSD (TransFlash), up to 16GB
- 32 GB internal memory
Data GPRS Class 32
HSCSD Yes
EDGE Class 32
3G HSDPA, 3.6 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, UPnP technology
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, v2.0 microUSB
Features OS Symbian OS v9.4, Series 60 rel. 5
Messaging SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML, RSS feeds
Games Yes + downloadable
Colors White, Brown
Camera 5 MP, 2584×1938 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, video(VGA@30fps), flash; secondary videocall camera
- Built-in GPS receiver
- A-GPS support
- Nokia Maps 2.0 Touch
- Digital compass
- Java MIDP 2.0
- MP3/WMA/WAV/eAAC+ player
- MPEG4/WMV/3gp video player
- Stereo FM radio with RDS
- TV out
- 3.5 mm audio output jack
- Voice command/dial
- Document viewer
- T9
- Flash Lite 3
- Built-in handsfree
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 1500 mAh (BL-4L)
Stand-by Up to 430 h
Talk time Up to 6 h 40 min
Nokia’s portfolio offers a couple of DVB-H capable solutions, specifically the Nokia N77 and a more dated phone, the N92. Neither of them was widely available, since they were used either in pilot television projects or tailored for particular regions (like the N77 in Taiwan, starting late fall 2007). Indeed, given that the vast majority of markets still have no DVB-H television enabled, a replica of the N73, yet armed with this functionality, was uncalled for. In March 2008, the European authorities standardized on DVB-H and from this point on will put in their efforts to support it. In this sense the Nokia N96 has a good chance to avoid the role of an ugly duckling that will never see release – thankfully, mobile television isn’t a big focus in the N96, it is rather included among all other things there.
Interestingly, over a year ago Nokia started to enhance its product portfolio not only by varying styles, but also hardware platform underpinning their solutions. The Nokia N95 and its follow-ups built upon the TI OMAP chip, while the N96 takes advantage of STMicroelectronics’s Nomadik. So when comparing these two phones, their similarities don’t go beyond physical aspects, since other things, like functionality and hardware, are quite different.
The phone measures in at 103×55x18 mm (125 grams) plus the camera part is even thicker due the rim around the lens that adds a couple of millimeters to the N96’s girth. On the whole, the N96 looks and feels more like some sort of shovel in the hand due to being quite wide – compared with the Nokia N81 it has gotten 0,5cm wider. While it is not a solution for women in any way, it is more about whether or not shop assistants will manage to convince them that it is the flagship solution. As far as I remember, the Nokia N93 wasn’t all that petite either, notwithstanding, women happily went for it and carried it around in their purses, and furthermore, some are still using it. It is important to realize that the Nokia N96’s dimensions are as close to the maximum as it get – its pocket-stretching casing won’t fit just about any jacket or trousers. Some may well argue with me on this, and I will readily agree that some types of clothes are perfect for the N96; but for the most part, it will not please you with its portability.
