02 Jun 2009

Nokia N97 Launched In UAE
Hands On The Final Retail Version

Today, I was lucky enough to spend around half an hour with the final version of the N97 in the N97 Launching Event in United Arab Emirates. This event was organised by Nseries Team.

As some of you might know, we in UAE are lucky enough to be one of the first countries to get the mighty N97. I got my hands on a black N97 and to be honest I was impressed.

The N97's size is just perfect. Not small but easily fits in the pocket. I have relatively small hands and I could handle it pretty nicely. The previous reports and previews we read were right that although it has a weird form factor it is very firm.

When opened to reveal the QWERTY Keypad it was almost impossible to close it by mistake. It is a pleasure to open the slider and close it. One thumb is enough to slide it open. As I mentioned earlier it was a black N97; However, I didn’t like the colour at all. It wasn’t the charcoal black I was hoping for. It was more of dark greyish than the Glossy charcoal black. The black colour feels like it was washed out unfortunately. However, the colour is a personal taste and some people might like it more this way.

The 3.5 inch screen does look great and all the icons and the on-screen buttons are much bigger than the ones found on the 5800. It is much more finger friendly than 5800 and a much more pleasurable experience. The N97's screen is not as elastic as 5800's screen. This gives it a higher quality feeling. It felt more Capacitive than resistive which I really like. It has the same feedback present on the 5800.

The keypad was pretty good too. The buttons are small but it wasn’t hard to type fast on. However the space bar is placed to the right and was hard as my fingers went to the lower middle part. After typing around 5 lines I started getting used to the weird spacebar location but I would have preferred it in the middle instead of the right. There is no Virtual QWERTY in the N97. If the physical QWERTY is closed, the only two options we get are the Hand writing Recognition and the Alphanumeric Keypad. I don’t understand why Nokia omitted the virtual QWERTY.

The OS was blazing fast. I think Nokia did a very good job optimising the software. The transitions were off the whole time though. I didn’t notice any slowdown at any point. The Maps application launched and fully loaded in less than 3 seconds. Apparently, the slightly faster Processor really makes a difference.

Browsing was a joy on the N97. The larger screen and the presence of kinetic scrolling in comparison with the 5800 really make a difference. Once the requested webpage is loaded, the browser automatically goes fullscreen. I really found this tweak pretty handy. The browser handles pages much better now and is not as sluggish as the 5800 when loading big pages. However, when I fully loaded the home page of Symbian Freak (which is a big site) the kinetic scrolling became a little choppy. But I must admit the N97 browser is miles ahead of the 5800's.

The only game that was present in the N97 I was checking was Guitar Rock Tour. It is something similar to Guitar Hero games with collared dots moving down a line. It looked like a java game with pretty bad graphics. I didn’t waste a lot of time on it.

I hope that my brief hands-on experience helped you in getting some information and deciding whether to get the N97 or wait for the next big thing. As for me I can not wait for mine to arrive this week.