Nokia N97 Review

Jul 4, 2010 by Shivendu Madhava

When it comes to multimedia, you might be hard pressed to find a device that offers more

Nokia’s N95 has been the flagship product of the brand for ages now, and still remains difficult to beat. While we mentioned it as the best convergence device in last month’s geek traveller’s guide, we were careful enough to add a footnote: “Until the N97”.

There is so much hardware packed into this beast, it is absolutely mind-boggling. The first aspect to greet you, as always, is the screen: At a mammoth 3.5 inches (16 million colours, 360×640 pixels), the resistive touchscreen has a proximity sensor, accelerometer, handwriting recognition, and could probably tell your future if you asked nicely. It is ideal for watching movies, and the 3.5mm audio jack will play back a thumping sound over your favourite headphones.

The screen slides up and stands on a novel tilting mechanism, a bit like the Xperia X1, and the full QWERTY keyboard invites you to have a go. Large, spacious keys and a wide screen to operate the Symbian S60 5th edition OS: the built-in Pocket Office suite now makes sense!

However, the highlight of the phone lies hidden behind. The N97 rocks a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, that bring you autofocus, LED flash and a video light for night-time footage. The 2592×1944 pixel images are great, but the 30fps VGA recording has stolen our hearts. And of course, there’s a secondary camera on the front for video calling.

The ARM 11 434 MHz processor and 128MB of RAM will naturally make the phone fast enough. But now comes the part where you need to brace yourself. Really, make sure you are lying down, lest you fall back with a thud. Nokia has thrown in an amazing 32GB of built-in memory (no, that’s not a typo) and you can increase this further with a 16GB microSD card. A potential 48GB of disk space on a mobile phone! You could fit your entire music collection on that, and then some! Didn’t we say you needed to brace yourself?

The usual suspects make their presence felt: 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, stereo FM radio, GPS (with Nokia Maps 2.0), voice command, TV-out, and support for any audio and video format you throw at it. A surprising addition is that the Adobe Flash Lite 3 plug-in comes pre-installed. Online videos, here we come!

With so many things to take care of, you would forgive the N97’s 1500 mAh battery for getting tired easily. But the Energizer bunny might hang its head in shame when it sees the Nokia play back up to 40 hours of music or nine and half hours of talk-time.

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