The ARM processor handles programs with ease and you can have simultaneous applications open at the same time. Pressing and holding the menu button will give you access to this open programs. The home screen is widget based which means you can add your favorite programs to your home screen to suit your everyday needs. On the top of the home screen, we have the clock, the date and the status icons which are not adjustable but underneath these icons are five adjustable widget slots. The default widgets are pretty useful.
In the top slot, we have quick launch icons for composing messages, web browser, navigation application and the media player. The second slot is occupied by the weather application and it’s actually one of the best weather applications I’ve come across. Actually, where the widget gets you hourly weather updates on your current location. And finally, we have some nice weather, too bad I’m stuck at the office making this review. The Facebook widget on the home screen works well also. You can actually have the newest status updates scrolling on your home screen because it is always good to know when your friends are off to buy a milk or brushing their teeth.
Under the Facebook widget, you can add your favorite contacts or not. As default, the lowest slot is occupied by the email widget. On the icon itself, you can see headers of the two newest emails and pressing the icon will get you to the email application. The email application works well and composing emails with the QWERTY keyboard is a delight.
Type in with the N97 QWERTY keyboard is very fast although not quite as fast as typing with the Touch Pro 2 keyboard. It would have also been nice to see a dedicated row of keys for the numbers. Customizing your home screen is a walk in the park. Removing and adding programs is a simple process.
There’s about a dozen of widgets to choose from and more widgets can be downloaded from the new Nokia Ovi store. The Ovi store is Nokia’s new application store where you can find a variety of stuffs spanning from free wallpapers to all kinds of application you can buy. The calendar application on the Symbian is pretty basic, nothing too fancy but it’s fast and easy to use and gets the job done.
The slight disappointment on the device is the YouTube application or lack there of it. The YouTube icon in the application menu is a bit deceiving. Pressing it only lays you to the YouTube mobile website. So, it’s not exactly dedicated YouTube application that you see on other devices. But you can always download the third party YouTube application made for Symbian S60. So, it’s not too big of a deal.
In the other hand, the Symbian web browser was a very positive surprise. The browser works well and scrolling and zooming within pages is smooth and fast. The Symbian browser works well on both landscape and portrait mode. The big screen on the N97 is ideal for web browsing. Most of the time, you won’t even have to zoom in to read text but in certain circumstances you want to get in nice and close and zooming in is done by double tapping the screen.
Loading times for content heavy sites on the Symbian are about the same for example when loading with opera mobile on a Windows Mobile device. Navigation on the web browser is done by using the touch screen. There’s also a very good alternate of this if you prefer not to grease up your screen. On the left side of the QWERTY keyboard is the D-pad which works great for the web browser. When comparing the two navigation methods, I personally prefer using the D-pad. It’s fast and accurate and it doesn’t smudge up the screen. All in all, I’m quite pleased with the performance of the Symbian web browser. It’s relatively fast and seems to be stable which is a factor when dealing with mobile web browsers.
The camera application on the N97 launches with haze, the five megapixel camera on the back is accompanied by dual LED’s. LED flashes usually tend to be on the weaker side so adding a second LED is not a bad idea. I took same test for the device in different lighting levels. Auto-focus and the LED’s work great. And the camera on the N97 is one of the best I’ve seen on a mobile device. It takes very good pictures and highlight and the thing that impresses me most is the camera takes very good pictures at low light as well. You can check out my test in full resolution at www.teknoreview.com.
Okay let's check out some of the more interesting features. N97 comes preinstalled with Nokia maps. It’s a navigation program that uses the built in GPS as well as the internet. A very cool feature in this application is the compass function that rotates the map to where you are going in practically real time. This makes the N97 a very good navigation device for when you are on foot for example trying to find your favorite sushi bar.
While driving around my car, I notice the GPS signal was not constant and they also have some GPS lacking. But the application got me where I was going and I’m pretty satisfied with the free application on the device. As I mentioned earlier, the device comes with a whapping 32 gigabytes of internal storage space. So, that’s plenty of space for pirated, I mean purchased music and videos. The music player on the Symbian is pretty decent. Albums are easily accessed. The sound quality is satisfactory. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about video playback. The device supports only a limited amount of codecs not including DivX, Xvid and H264 which are probably the most common formats around these days.
So, if your entire video catalogue in is DivX, you're pretty much screwed unless you want to convert your entire catalogue into 3GP format. I could not get CorePlayer or DivX mobile to work with the device because they are yet not supported by Symbian S60 5th edition. Eventually, these formats probably will be supported but for now, DivX is a no go. But the formats that N97 does support, it plays with ease excluding flash video which is quite the slideshow.
For my benchmark video, I’ll be using the trailer for a movie called 2012. I was pretty excited when I saw the first teaser for the movie. But after discovering that Roland Emmirek is directing the movie, my expectations aren’t too high. His last movie 10000 BC was the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen. I mean it was so bad that I almost cried. But actually did like Independence Day though. Anyways, the picture quality on the N97 is pretty decent, colors and contrasts are very good and the screen resolution is quite adequate for video playback.
The N97 doesn’t even skip a beat when playing the 3GP format at relatively high bit rates. Eventhough the image quality on the 3GP format may not be perfect, it is still a very decent format for mobile devices. I was quite impressed to see that the N97 could handle the format at 7000 kilobytes per second. Eventhough I am unimpressed by the lack of support of codecs, I am impressed by how well the device plays the codecs it does support.
In conclusion, the N97 is quite a mixed bag. External features and built quality are excellent. I’m still impressed by the keypad mechanism and the QWERTY keyboard itself but the Symbian operating system may be a bit too old school for my taste but it works okay and the Symbian browser was not bad at all. Is it a perfect device? By all means no. It has a few flaws here and there but the N97 is definitely a buyable upgrade for Nokia fans. The New N series device arrived with the highest of expectations and all things considered the N97 was able to handle most of them.
So, that’s pretty much it for my review. Thanks for watching. Check out our website at www.teknoreview.com. And before you leave, check out this sneak preview into my next video, L0P signing out.
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