Things to love and hate about the Nokia N97

Posted on Thursday, Jun 18, 2009 by Matthew Miller

11 Comments » File Under:News, Nseries, TouchUI;

There are things we all love and hate about the devices we buy, no matter how awesome they are. At first you read that I was pleased with the N97, but not overwhelmed. I plan to post soon my 1 week thoughts on the N97 and have to say I am much more impressed with it than when I first started using it. Our Nokia Experts buddy, Ricky Cadden, received his white N97 this week and put together things he loves about the N97 and things he hates about the N97.

n97_first1

I agree with all of the things he loves and could include several more as you will see in my one week with the N97 post. I also completely agree with items 1 (this is my MAJOR pet peeve), 2, 5, and 6 of his hate list. As the flagship product, priced quite high, I would not expect to see a few of these things listed in his hate list and hope that Nokia addresses some of them soon with updates. My fear is that those of us with NAM devices will continue to be left behind with updates, but since we actually saw the N97 available before most of the world maybe Nokia has changed and their updates will come to us in a timely manner as well.

Any readers with a Nokia N97 care to chime in with your love/hate list?

11 Comments to Things to love and hate about the Nokia N97

Jeremiah Owen
June 18, 2009

Here’s my list:

Love - Love the widgets, great to have a dynamic view of what’s going on. Esp. with the new Gravity widget. - Coming from the iPhone loving background processes - Being able to use Fring/VOIP over cell network - Loudness, it’s so much better

Hate - Hate that the Facebook app is buggy, half the time I have to close it because the keyboard starts typing symbols like &*^$ instead of letters. -Sling Player does not work. Really bummed about this, and my message I received back from Sling gives me little hope that it will ever be updated or released. -Syncing with my mac has been a royal pain. -Please, please Nokia make it so that I can schedule Sync sessions, going through 3 layers of menus to do it is not a quick task. - Ovi stor, come one Nokia this is a no-brainer. Fix it. - Weird backlight issue when locking/unlocking.

I am having a wierd issue with syncing right now. I can’t sync in media transfer mode unless I first hook it up to windows in PC Suite mode. After that it syncs fine. Very strange.

Ricardo
June 19, 2009

Got mine yesterday and here’s my quick first impression:

LOVE — *The usability of the home screen. After three years with other Nseries devices and their clunky Active Standby screens, I am very pleased to be able to tap on widgets, clock, profiles and even the upper right hand corner to control so many useful phone features. *How snappy the OS feels, even with low memory available and many apps running. Seems like memory management is much better than older Nseries devices. *Build quality. SOLID as an Eseries, no creaks, no wobbles. Love it love it love it.

HATE – *Having to double-tap on so many items on screens. I am still getting used to it, I guess, but it is still annoying not really knowing if I have to double-tap or single-tap on something. *Scrolling. I wish I could just grab a screen, anywhere, and flick it with my finger instead of having to grab the scroll bar. *Not getting more cool themes or the “barrel”-to-micro USB adapter which I guess is thrown into the EU version.

Ted
June 23, 2009

Shoddy journalism! Agreeing with Ricky on #1 without doing independent research. Yes, the N97 has 128mb RAM, but Ricky ignores the 256 MB of NAND. Nokia does implement EFD’s (emulated flash drives) in NAND that have IPX(in place execution). I have seen, on my 97, a huge amount of paging with free mem going from 45 mb to 13 mb REGARDLESS if I’m running: 0 apps (clean boot), 5 apps, or 10 apps. (apps include Maps 3, profimail, camera, buddy cloud, Tweets60, browser, youtube, music player, FM transmitter, podcasting). I would suggest that it is improbable to get to 10 MB free and keep it there- UNLESS you are loading and running apps that violate memory managemnt rules. I have noticed that many apps that run on other FP1 & FP2 devices will throw up the “this application is not compatible with this phone” warning messages when you try and load them on the N97.

To date I have had only 2 crashes/restarts- fewer then my E-71, N-85, 5800 in the same period – and that was because I loaded apps that were flagged as incompatible. Once removed I have not had any problems. Assuming that all Symbian apps will run flawlessly/not cause performance issues on a new piece of hardware is a major assumption, that I feel is flawed.

Ted

Smartphone Experts Roundtable 5 | Gizmo Addiction
June 25, 2009