Hurray for hardware standards, though. It charges over the same microUSB port that plugs into your computer, not the little tiny peehole that's been Nokia standard for a million years. A standard 3. Overall, as much there is wrong internally, there's a lot to like in the hardware—it'd be total win with a faster processor and more brilliant screen, since the battery seems more than up to the task. Software I don't even know where to start the hate parade I want to unleash on S60 5th edition.
And when legacy sorry, mature software runs into a crappy half-assed UI, it's a steaming pile of suck on a slab of garbage toast.
All I could think about was how badly I wanted to shove Android onto it. Since I have nothing nice to say, let's keep this part short. Nokia's instinct to widgetize the homescreen, giving you access to messaging, maps, the browser, Facebook or whatever else you want is a good one, and one of the few non-terrible things about the user interface.
But even its visual feel is dated and worn, like someone dragged into the present tied to the back of a battered and rusted pickup truck. Yuck visual elements abound—in landscape mode, there's a fairly persistent right-side dock of buttons, that steal screen real estate for no discernible reason at times. And inconsistency seems to be the rule. Some stuff you double tap to activate, other stuff you single tap. There's a list in the manual detailing which is which—I forget.
There's no flick scrolling, except for when there is, like in the Ovi Store. The phone's built-in apps are solid, mostly, with the exception of the default email program download Nokia Messaging 1. The interface isn't as easy to use, like to zoom, but hey, it does Flash Lite, so suck on that everybody. The browser's back button serves up thumbnails of previously visited websites you can zip through, a desperately needed touch of form and function on this phone.
Nokia Maps, if you want more than the basics—namely pedestrian or voice-guided navigation—you get a three-month trial before you have to pay up for a subscription. That said, it's feature rich, with a compass, multiple map modes like 3D, traffic info and points of interest, though not as easy to use to pick and use as Google Maps on other platforms.
I handed it and an iPhone off to a friend in my car while navigating deep into the wastelands of Alabama, and Google Maps proved much easier for them to deal with, despite their intense dislike for all things Apple.
It's pre-crammed with a buttload of mostly excellent third party apps as well: Qik, RealPlayer, YouTube, JoikuSpot Premium, Accuweather, Facebook a really impressive though appropriately S60 version and Spore, to name just a handful. Qik in particular is fantastic—I set up an account and was livestreaming video within a minute of popping open the app. That's fortunate, because the Ovi Store manages to have the worst mobile app store interface I've seen yet.
And it's "stuff," not apps, since Nokia hawks a melange of goods at Ovi, from wallpapers to ringtones to apps, often jumbling them all on a single page. Speaking of Ovi, the desktop suite, also named Ovi, didn't fall far from the Ovi tree—it's a natural disaster that's not a single app for managing your phone, but a handful of distinct apps that intersect in the actual "suite" launcher application. Imagine iTunes, then its remarkably confusing total opposite, ontologically speaking.
And I'm not even getting into the Ovi online services, which are distinct from Nokia's other offerings, so I wound up creating two wholly different accounts in the process of getting my N97 totally setup. Conclusion Nokia has to know where it stands. At least, assuming somebody actually used the N97 before it went out the door.
Symbian S60 5th Edition only makes sense if it's a stopgap keeping Nokia in the game barely until they put out an actual next-generation OS, just like the underwhelming Windows Mobile 6.
I'm really hoping for a complete rebuild of Symbian. I am not expecting Nokia to turn to an entirely different OS from a certain Goo-ey company despite recent and retarded rumors. Nokia is married to Symbian for the long haul—after all, they paid nearly half a billion dollars for it. That's the only way I can fathom them releasing something this unusable into a world populated by the iPhone, Palm Pre, Android and BlackBerry.
If this really is the best Nokia can do, the giant is doomed to die a slow death, propped up for a while by the cheap handsets that it sells by the tens of millions. Two-way FM transmitter for playing music over car radio is awesome. Keyboard feels nice, but weird layout might bug some people. High-res touchscreen, though it doesn't make the most of it. The major thumbs down for the hardware is the processor.
What should have happened, of course, was that, at the very least, someone in the N97 product team should have said, in the first half of "You know, I think users might need more memory - RAM and system disk space - otherwise they're going to run out! So noone triggered a warning bell. Instead, it was in the first few months after release that the penny started to drop and, even then, users started getting very low on internal disk space. It really was an issue, it seemed, and so on the N97 mini and subsequent S60 5th Edition devices, like the X6 came with an extra MB of system disk space, which remains enough to this day.
So the lesson was learned, but it was a very expensive one. RAM was still limited by the S60 5th Edition architecture, it seemed, and every such device from Nokia has had to make do with MB - for everything. It's still a problem when you start pushing one of these devices, with large apps closing down in the background - annoyingly. Other mistakes were less technical and were more easily rectified. The camera glass cover scratched the very thing it was supposed to protect - cue a redesigned cover, fitted after about October The GPS antenna was under-sized and badly shielded from the N97's main circuitry - cue a re-designed antenna and the addition of a special shield around it so that it was less affected by stray electronic RF signals.
Also perhaps coming under the category of 'mistake' was the use of a resistive touchscreen, though at the time there were no swiping motions in S60 5th Edition - it was all tap, tap, tap, something that resistive screens are very good at, especially with a stylus - something that the shipped with! The iPhone UI changed expectations though, and as of v20 firmware swiping and kinetic scolling was firmly now part of Symbian - yet the Nokia phones were saddled with a resistive screen that was great in temperature and humidity extremes, but which was fragile and relatively unresponsive to the new, more sophisticated gestures needed in a UI.
All of which was fixed in the N97's replacements, the N8 and E7 though would have been nice to have combined more of the features into the one device - in fact, it's a compliment to the N97 that it needed two devices to replace it Other defects were less obviously design decisions and simply trade-offs.
The tinny speakers, for example, had no room left for any kind of acoustic cavity. The plastic battery back allowed RF through and added minimal bulk. And so on. The upshot, though, was that, especially after summer , with Nokia's software releases and runtime decisions, the N97 became less and less practical for using it was anything other than a basic messaging phone and camera. The N97 mini solved enough of the issues that I voted it my no.
Well, in the light of the litany of problems above - not a lot. Unless you're prepared to ignore some of the software Nokia provide and go down the third party route especially for email. I did an extensive piece on Pimping the Nokia N97 back in February and most of this is still very valid. But you're still fighting against the prevailing tide, to be honest. If you love the N97 form factor i. OK, you'll lose the FM transmitter and 'hero' battery, but you do gain more internal disk space and a brighter, more vivid screen - indoors.
So, a valid option - but do get a spare battery from a reputable seller - you'll need it. Though do note that some Qt-written applications are still not available for the N97 mini, despite its more capacious internal disk. With a very similar mechanism, there's the brand new and still relatively expensive Nokia E7, with far better software and compatibility but you're limited on overall capacity, again there's no FM transmitter, and the camera's very limited compared to the N97's magnificent Carl Zeiss 5mp affair.
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