Nokia
did well with the announcements of Nokia World. Biggest news in mobile
town being the N97. It has all a n-series phone needs: Wopping battery
life, 5MPixel photo, 30 fps 640x480 Video and all the trimmings of the
N95-class phones. I have only three complaints.
- No Xenon flash,
let's be honest. Dual led for video simply sucks, and it pales
completely in comparison with xenon flash for photo's. At least the
current dual led models do. And it will be a while until they get that
right it seems.
12 cm's long? Okay to be
precise 11,7 cm. Still it's a bit to clumsy. A smartphone that is not
pocketable is not a smartphone, its a netbook/laptop/fancy piece of
heavy luggage.
150 grams? Another pocketable size complaint. 120 grams please at the most 130 grams.
With
the new Symbian v5 touchscreen software, Maps, NGage and the social
contact integration on the standby screen it looks like a winner. Early
adopters of the N95 like me will pine about this machine until it's
available. Still I think it's current size and weight will make people
hesitate to buy it. Only time will tell whether the N97's size will position itself
for as a E90 replacement for businessmen or as a anytime, anyplace
phone for a larger group of smartphone addicts.
All in all it is pretty close to my personal wish list for Christmas, though it seems Santa will be half a year late ;-) I would love to test this phone and see if it can cope with one of
my 14x16 hours trips of satnav, e-mail, phototagging and
videorecording. It killed the last two N95 I owned, despite being never
dropped.
I guess
The N97 will likely be the
most expected phone for the first half of 2009. Supplemented with the
new maps and e-mail integration into OVI Nokia seems more back on
track than ever. The new social contact integration on the home screen
of the N97 could very well indicate further developments in the new
Symbian OS. Gearing it more towards the social demands an
internet junky like me has. This includes multiple internet identities
(work, hobby, private, etc.) and syncing per identity. They might even start thinking of simple things being allowed to simply cloud tag
your e-mail. Who has ever properly used the subject line in an e-mail? And yes, gtalk/jabber with video running on it would be a blast too.
N97 movie 1
N97 movie 2
update: hands on video movie 3