
A good mobile phone but not excellent
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.
Nokia N97 seems to have pretty much all that one can desire; of course it has no coffee maker or hair dryer, but if you need constantly an access to world wide web, a memo, a map, a media player, a good camera and if you also need a mobile phone, this device can be all them. I was looking for a mini laptop (netbook), but since N97 has similar features and it fits well into my purse, I chose the phone instead of the small laptop.
What is really good with N97, is that you can customize it by yourself pretty well. You can download useful widgets, themes, sounds, games etc. directly from Nokia's Ovi store to your phone. Some of the widgets are free, some are not.
The phone has also a touch screen, which seems to be a trend with all new cell phones at the moment. This is my first touch screen device, so I can't really combine it with anything. However, the screen seems to respond even to quite gentle touches. The bigger your fingers are the harder it is to use the phone, I think. Then you'll have to use the little stylus that comes with the phone.
The problem with big fingers can also occur in another way. Nokia N97 has a QWERTY keyboard. It can be slided out under the screen for typing. Although the keys have a nice matte surface, it can be difficult to hit the right key because they're very close to each other and very small. I had a similar problem with my old phone, Nokia E70. Also that comes with a QWERTY keyboard.
For a Scandinavian N97 gives one other problem; we use a lot of letters like ä and ö, but although Nokia is a Scandinavian brand this cell phone has no individual keys for these letters. If your phone has a Scandinavian language pack installed, you can find these letters hidden under other keys. It's a bit tricky.
The language pack isn't an easy case. For example, if you speak Greek, Japanese and English, you can't just go and upload these language packs to your phone by yourself. If you have bought your N97 from UK, it probably has only English installed. To change this, you'll need to go to the Nokia custom service and ask them to upload a more suitable language pack to your phone. I had to do this with my N97. It had French and English language packs, but in the operation I lost the French pack while I got a Scandinavian language pack instead. In my case this doesn't really matter, but for somebody else... Plus, this operation is not free. I had to pay about 30 euros for it.
Although N97 has very good features, it's too early to call the phone excellent. I haven't used mine for long yet but it has crashed several times already. This has usually happened with the phone's web browser or camera.
N97 is also hungry for energy. While I had to charge my old E70 once in three days, N97 needs to be charged once in a day. It helps if I turn off N97's fancy effects and set also its weather, e-mail and news widgets offline. BTW, if you keep these widgets online and don't pay for the data transfer just a monthly fee, you will soon get a huge phone bill. With N97 you must have a pay monthly contract with your operator for the internet use, since this phone is made for web surfing.
At the moment Nokia N97 is a good moblie phone despite its little faults. I presume it gets just better when the next firmwire update is available.
Review ID: 10000000013604756

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