aBrilliantBlog

I want to start off by thanking WOM World once again for sending me the amazing Nokia N97.  It is without a doubt in my mind one of the most technically advanced and good looking mobile phones on the market to date.  It blows many handsets out of the water, chews them up and spits them out, in some ways.  In other ways it’s inferior to much older phones produced by Nokia also.

To start with it’s beautiful when opened up.  I’m a fan of phones with a QWERTY keyboard and this bad boy sports a pretty reasonable keyboard when it’s opened up.  The buttons don’t give much feedback at all but sometimes that nice.  The phone feels good in your hand and in my pocket, it looks big in some aspects like thickness but it really isn’t all that thick compared to other similar devices.   Physically the N97 is just splendid, it incorporates so many aspects and does it well.

Now when it comes to the software it fails miserably in my opinion.  It’s not a phone for the meek.  I consider myself a well versed and competent Nokia phone user and in so many cases I stumbled around with the N97.   I have been able to hand almost any other Nokia S40 or S60 phone to my Dad and he can easily figure it out, I would not even attempt to give this phone to my Dad.  He would be lost and frustrated.  For example the auto rotation doesn’t always work when the phone is slid shut and going back and forth from vertical to horizontal and back.  The response is also quite slow to a point that I’m hitting things again because I think I missed it the first time and then I’m getting into the wrong app when it finally catches up.

I have had the N97 browser crash more times then I can count.  I think it may have something to do with the lack of built in Ram.   How can Nokia let that happen to a flagship phone?  I expected these problems to go away as soon as the first firmware update rolled out.  I even waited to write up my review till I had that infamous first firmware update but the update came and went and I continued to have the same issues.

There are a ton of great aspects to the N97 including it’s camera, 3.5mm audio jack, video out, slider lock and many many more points.  I have tried giving it chance after chance but it just kept failing me.  Battery life and lack of ease of use are two big points without tearing it apart.  I can’t in good faith suggest that you go out and buy this phone at this point.  I hope that we will see additional updates and I hope I get to give the N97 another try.  It has some awsome aspects to it but to many major draw backs.