Political Cancer

Here’s my thoughts after a week or so with the N97. I’ll touch on things I’ve found good and bad, and also try to touch on some of the things I’ve heard mentioned throughout the internet that I can give my own opinion on.

I’m going to start off by saying I’m very happy with the Nokia N97. When I got it, I was hoping it would be a competent and capable combination of the “business class” Nokia E71 and the “media powerhouse” that is the Nokia N95 8GB. I pretty much feel that I’ve gotten my wish. The N97 is capable of handling longer emails with easier text entry using the QWERTY keyboard, has a nice big screen for viewing websites, emails, pictures and videos, and also has the media capabilities of the N95–5mp camera, video recording at 30fps, and of course huge amounts of room for storage of files and media. The only thing I’m missing so far is a full version of QuickOffice for creating and editing Word and Excel documents on the device, which was very nice to have on my E71.

Battery life. This is one area where I was quite concerned. The N97 uses the same battery as the E71, and as I stated in my Nokia N97, First Impressions post, I was getting at most a day of usage (5am to 11pm, and I’d have 1-2 battery bars left) out of the E71 (Profimail running from 5am to 10pm, moderate internet, email, text and call usage). With the larger touch screen on the N97, I was a bit more worried about the battery not being able to last a full day. I’m very happy to say that, so far, the battery is doing WAY better than I expected. I removed the widgets from the homescreen that use data (Facebook, AccuWeather), as I heard early on that this helps in terms of battery life. I also have the all the touch tones/vibrations off, so the only noises and vibrations occur when a call or message comes in. I’ve got Profimail set up with four Gmail accounts that push to the phone, and another pop3 account that is polled every 15 minutes. I have bluetooth on all day, but only have a headset connected for about 2-3 hours or so. (I have since added the AccuWeather widget back to my homescreen, will update with how that affects battery life, if at all).

Keyboard. This was another (albeit minor) concern. There were so many people out there trashing the N97’s keyboard, it made it a much bigger issue than it should have been, in my opinion. I’ve used many different QWERTY devices over the past several years, and in all reality the keyboard from one device to the next IS in fact different. The shape of the keys, the spacing between the keys, even the layout of the keys has been slightly different in some cases (especially true of the symbol and number keys). So, the N97’s keyboard did take some getting used to, but again I have found that true whenever I have switched to a new QWERTY phone…even going from one Blackberry to another. Yes, the space bar is located on the right side of the keyboard, and the D-pad is on the left side of the keyboard…I’ve seen some reviewers say this makes the keyboard horrible, that the D-pad isn’t usable where its at, that the spacebar being on the right side is a horrible place for it… I have not found this to be true in my personal experience. The placement of both the D-pad and the spacebar are working just fine for me. I do find myself wishing that the keys had just a little more feel to them (whether it was raised keys like on the E71 (see top pic above), or dots on the keys, or something), and that they had a bit more positive feel when being typed on (not much movement, some keys are hard to tell if you’ve pressed them even), but neither of these make me really *hate* the keyboard in any way. Its not perfect, but perfect is hard to find in any mobile device, and perfect is also certainly very subjective.

Connectivity. Another different between the Nokia E71 that I’m very much used to and the Nokia N97 is the use of “Destinations” for the data connection settings. On the E71 when you opened an application that uses data, you would be asked which connection you would like to use…if you were in an area with wifi, you would see the wifi connection, the data connection from your cellular carrier, and a few other options from your cellular carrier too. On the N97, as you save wifi connections that you use, they are added to a “Destination”. For instance, my N97 has Internet, Multimedia msg, and WAP services listed as Destinations. So, when I add a new wifi signal, I can choose to list it within one of these three Destinations. Applications that use data (such as the web browser) then open using one of those Destinations (many applications rely on a default Destination, such as when sending an MMS message, its sent through the Multimedia msg Destination). The phone automatically sets itself up using the wifi signals as first priority before resorting to using the cellular carrier data signal, which is a nice feature in my opinion. And, there is no more having to decide which connection method to use every time I open an application that uses data…this, to me, is a pretty convenient thing…takes a few less clicks to get to what you want.

Memory. Another issue that has been at the forefront of many Nokia N97 discussions is the amount of RAM the device has. When you power the device on, most people are reporting 45-50Mb of RAM being available…I have also found this to be the case on my unit. The issue here, is that the more applications that you have open, the available RAM will decrease and eventually cause applications to shut down, or cause the device to slow down to an unusable pace. Not sure I’d consider myself a true “power user” or not, as I don’t often have numerous RAM intensive apps open at once, but I have yet to have a problem with the N97 being much slower then my E71 was while doing the same tasks–and most people consider the E71 to be a very quick device. Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t to say that the amount of available RAM isn’t an issue, I’m just saying it hasn’t been in my case. As you can see in the screenshot, I have numerous applications running when I snapped this shot (I actually had just fired up Gravity moments before this shot, for the first time that day–those that use it know it is very data intensive until it “catches up” to the current timeline), the RAM is down to around 14Mb, and the phone was working just fine for all other purposes. So, for true power users–people that have a radio stream going, gps, and a few other apps open–I can certainly see how the RAM could be an issue.

Harware. This phone is built really, really well in my opinion. Its a solid feeling phone that is easy to hand on to, easy to hold to your head for a phone call, easy to flip open to reveal the QWERTY keyboard, and still easy to carry in a pocket if desired. Not much else I can say really, I’m very happy with the fit and finish of the phone. While I may still be kind of new to Nokia devices on the whole, I have owned and use the N95 8GB, the E71, and now the N97. The E71, with its metal case, is built exceptionally well, and feels like it could withstand quite a beating–no creaks, gaps, etc. The N95’s plastic housing, while good looking, didn’t really feel all that sturdy really, felt kind of cheap. The N97 though, I think TheGuru over at Symbian-Guru put it best when he said “the Nokia N97 is finally an Nseries that feels like it was built by the Eseries team” in his hardware review. There is hope that a future firmware update will free up a little bit more RAM, but again for a true power user it still may be a noticeable issue with the N97.

Touch screen. I have noticed a few complaints out there regarding the touch screen on the N97 as well. Its a resistive touch screen, which means that it does need to detect a little bit of force for it to work, you have to push a little bit for the touch to be recognized. I’ve seen a few videos showing people having to jab pretty hard at their N97’s to get it to recognize a touch and it still won’t even work. My own device is not like this at all. While this is my first touch-screen device, I must admit that it works better than I thought it would. I have not found a need for the stylus at all, even though one is included with the phone. If the links are that small, I slide the keyboard open and use the D-pad to navigate to links/text I am interested in.

Bugs and problems. I have had very few issues with this phone, which I am very happy to report. I have read several complaints lately regarding Nokia Messaging causing the device to crash, or the app itself crashing, and I’m happy to say I don’t use Nokia Messaging, so I may have “dodged a bullet” there. The only real issue I have had is when I use the slider to unlock the device, on occasion, the backlight will not come on, even though the unlock screen will appear prompting me to enter my unlock code. If I push a button on the phone before sliding the unlock slider, I am most often guaranteed to have this issue. Sometimes after this happens, it really is a PITA to get the backlight to come on…in most cases I set the phone down, wait a few minutes and try it all over again, and it seems to work fine. Hopefully a future firmware release will address this (if not though, its really not that much of an issue to me to begin with, but it’d be nice). The only other issue that I can report is that after a week of use, I was getting a “low phone memory” error message. Sure enough, I checked and the phone memory was down to 1.something MB. Having installed most of my applications on the phones 32GB internal memory card, I couldn’t figure out what would cause this. I performed a hard reset on the device and spent the following hour or so reinstalling everything, making sure it was all on the internal memory card. In the end, I didn’t need to do any of this though, as I found the memory usage was related to the web browser having cached every page I had visited on the device so far. Having dealt with this, I now clear the cache every few days just to prevent any issues.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the Nokia N97. It combines the best features of the N95 and E71 (as I had hoped it would), is easy to use, and I’m very happy with the form factor of the phone. Yes, there is more that could be asked of it (faster processor, more RAM, etc), but in the end, I do think it is one of, if not THE best handset Nokia has made–certainly the best I have used (all of you that have been following Nokia for many years now, forgive me if you disagree, and keep in mind I’ve just recently been “converted” ).

Tags: Blackberry, E71, Gravity, N97, Nokia, Nokia e71, Nokia N97, Profimail, widget