Playing with the Nokia N97
Nokia N97 - White
So last week I received the Nokia N97 for review. I’ve had some time to play with it now. And all I can say is… “What an awesome multimedia phone”.
When I first started using the phone, I felt a bit lost and did not like it at all. My very first problem was I missed the menu button completely and had a colleague show me where the button was. Secondly I kept on comparing the phone against the HTC Dream.
As I used the phone I started liking it more and more. It has a 3.5 inch TFT touch screen with 16 million colours. The touch capabilities are very accurate, even when not using the stylus. You also have three different “desktops”, which you can personalise according to certain aspects of your lifestyle. Example: you can have all your multimedia applications on your one desktop, and all your business like applications on another. You access your different desktops by pressing on the screen and dragging it to either the left or to the right.
One of the things I most enjoyed about the phone, I only found out by accident. While driving in my car I noticed my phone battery was about to die. So I got out the USB cable, attached it to my phone and figured let me see if it will charge if I plug it into my radio’s USB. Yes, it started charging, but wait… It also started playing the music I had on my phone. That’s 32gigs of music with you on the road. So I hear some of you saying, I still have a tape drive in my car. Not a problem, enable your FM transmitter on your phone, and tune your radio to the frequency you are transmitting. There you go, music from your phone over your radio all 32 GB’s of it.
When I was not listening to music from the phone over my radio, I used the built in music player with crisp clear sound over stereo speakers on the phone. When opening up the music player, you have the option of playing the “last played song”, thought that was a nifty feature. Your music library is broken down into Artist, Album and Playlist. Which makes it easy when looking for a song in your 32 gig library.
The Nokia comes with a built in 5 mega pixel camera AND a flash. This allows for some brilliant photo moments to be remembered with or without sufficient light. One thing I noticed while taking photo’s in not so bright times, was that the flash shows up on the photo’s giving you this white flare on the side of the picture.
Sending messages is a dream. Flip open the phone, and use your QWERTY keyboard to start typing and sending your message. One disappointing factor with the messaging of the Nokia N97 is that your messages are not threaded. It’s not a train smash, but it is nice to only have one “Patrick” in your inbox and browsing through the thread, instead of 20 messages from “Patrick” to read through.
Nokia N97 - White
Don’t know how to spell a word or what the meaning of a word is? No problem, open up your dictionary application look up the word and carry on with what you were doing. Need to know how much $20 is in South African currency? Open up your converter application, punch in the numbers and get the currency conversion. The phone has converters for currency, area, energy and length.
So you’ve got your email setup on your phone and you received a office document, no problem you can open up word documents, excel documents, power point presentations and PDF files from your phone.
The Nokia N97 is packed with tons of other applications. RealPlayer for watching videso. Feeling creative, open up the drawing application and do some finger painting. GPS navigation, Message reader, Skype. This is only part of what Nokia has to offer with the introduction of Ovi Store which is Nokia’s application portal for all Nokia devices that support it, more to come on it soon.
This is a awesome multimedia rich phone. And I absolutely love it. You can pick it up in either Black or White.
General
2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100
HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100 – American version
Size Dimensions
117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm, 88 cc
Weight
150 g
Display Type
TFT resistive 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
Sound Alert types
Vibration; MP3 ringtones
Speakerphone
Yes, with stereo speakers
- 3.5 mm audio jack
Memory
Phonebook - Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records – Detailed, max 30 days
Internal - 32 GB storage, 128 MB RAM
Card slot – microSD (TransFlash), up to 16GB, buy 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
USB Yes, v2.0 microUSB
Camera
Primary 5 MP, 2592×1944 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, LED flash, video light
Features Geo-tagging
Video Yes, VGA@30fps
Secondary Yes, VGA@15fps
This was posted by stephan who has posted 69 items.
→ Nokia N97 goes 2.0 – Tx Daily said on: October 30, 2009 at 11:35 am
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