Nokia N97

It's been a long time coming, but after dabbling with touch on the midrange 5800, Nokia has finally brought a touchscreen to an S60 "N-Series" smartphone, the N97. Take a look at my hands-on impressions and the complete rundown on Nokia's new flagship.

But it's not quite a full dive into touch-there's still a horizontal QWERTY keyboard hidden below the 3.5" 640x360 resistive touchscreen and accesable via a smooth 30° flip mechanism. The N97 will run an even further touch-enhanced Symbian OS, S60 v5, which features the 5800's quick contacts bar and adds an assortment of customizable desktop widgets that can pipe in your Facebook info, RSS feeds and the like, much like those found on Nokia's internet tablet OS. The widgets will be open to third party developers and available via the traditional "Downloads" Symbian app "for now" says Nokia-so not quite the App Store equivalent fans would hope for, but customization via software add-ons is definitely the route being pursued here.

The hardware is indeed pretty-befitting a £600 Nokia piece. The desktop Symbian widgets look nice, but the drawbacks of a resistive touchscreen were immediately noticeable when dragging widgets around the desktop. A resistive touchscreen relies on pressing two layers of screen together with a fingernail or stylus to register a signal, so it is not as responsive as a capacitive screen which is driven by the natural electricity in your fingers.

Rounding out the gaudy specs are 32GB of on-board memory (with 16GB more available via microSD), A-GPS with Nokia's refreshed Maps 3.0 app and a compass, accelerometer for landscape/portrait screen switching, 5MP camera with Zeiss lens and LED flash, 3.5mm headphone jack, and N-Gage support and the brand new 3.5 inches 16:9 widescreen (640x360 pixels) display is far the best available on the market.

I would not be surprised if the N97 would make bigger impact than the N95.