Nokia N97 32GB is neither thin nor easy, primarily because of the QWERTY slide keyboard, being a phone that sits better in a hand of a man. The slide is firm, its opening being a bit tricky at first. At least it got me a little, until I figured out how and where to click to open it. When the keyboard is opened, the phone looks like a laptop, a micro one of course.
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The front is dominated by the touch screen, which, to be honest, could have been even bigger. At the top end of the phone, we find the speaker, the camera and the photo sensor, and on the bottom end, we have three buttons, one for accessing the menu, placed obliquely, and the touch sensitive buttons, which accept or reject calls.
The 3.5 inch screen is big enough for almost an optimal viewing, in mobile conditions, of websites and various office-type documents. It is quite bright even in daylight and has an excellent viewing angle. It responds very well to tapping, even at the multi-touch tapping, so I cannot say that I encountered problems while using it. I like a lot the fact that it has an accelerometer, which repositions the image depending on the phone’s position. it is realized quickly and without errors.
Should I say something about the pure telephony? It became kind of a secondary application for the smartphone of today. It remains the most effective way of communication. It worked perfectly, without losing the signal and the conversations I have had were decent. When writing telephone numbers, the virtual numeric keypad worked great. It has large enough buttons, so you cannot accidentally click on another number then the one desired. A little harder, I adapted to the address book search. It is quite hard, and is one of those minor drawbacks.
Another element, which has not left me careless, is the battery autonomy. The Li-Ion BP-4L battery provided us about 3 days of use. I want to say that after using it, every time I blocked the screen to save energy.
The phone has available the GPS and the A-GPS functions, the last one being of great help in a faster positioning. On this big screen, the maps can be viewed in quite visible conditions for our eyes.
The Navteq map is more complete, more detailed, even with different POI (points of interest) and, with the possibility of navigation. The phone has 4-ways to view them, 2D, 3D, Satellite and Hybrid, I choose the last one for its combination of Photo / Map that it provides, with which we can focus more easily. Thanks to the 3G, the map is loading very fast when walking. The A-GPS positioned me accurately, and as long as I used it, I encountered no errors.
Nokia N97 32GB is a business phone. Or, at least through the aspect, this is the first impression that it leaves us. Now, those from Nokia, after bringing together a touchscreen with a QWERTY keyboard, they have included multimedia top features. They have expanded its area of use in this segment so loved and used by us.
First, the phone has an internal memory of 32 GB. Huge! How many documents or emails you need to take with you? Honestly, I do not have so many tons of documents or emails not even on the computer. The huge internal memory is not for documents but for collections, many music, photos or videos collections.
The first multimedia applications, which we all think of, are the ones used for listening to music or viewing some small videos. The phone is compatible with MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC +, WMA audio files. Unfortunately, it does not have support for HD files. Maybe the next generation will have. So far, we are limited to MP4 and 3GP video files. It can be considered another small inconvenient. They did not go all the way with the multimedia facilities.
I liked how the music sounds both through the built-in loudspeaker and through the headphones from the package. We can even use other headphones, because the phone has a 3.5 mm jack. The phone has the same player that we are used to from the Symbian OS, which also has predefined equalizer settings. The sound has a decent quality, at least for me.
The following is a 5 megapixel camera that gives good results for a cell phone, both on the photo and especially on the video part. Nokia N97 32GB’s camera has Carl Zeiss Tessar 2.8/5.4 AF lens and 5-Megapixels. The Auto Focus works precisely, without errors, even from very close range in Macro mode. The flash is powerful enough even for the largest outdoor shooting in these conditions causing noise, but the best is to photograph from a close range, max 1.2 meters.
The phone has available some settings such as scenes (Automatic, M - user defined, Macro, Portrait, Landscape, Sport, Night, Night Portrait), color tones (Normal, Sepia, Black & White, Vivid, Negative), White Balance, Exposure, ISO (automatic, low, medium, high), contrast, type of shooting (single shot or multishot).
The images made have geo-coding possibility or can be shared directly through the Internet through OVI. They can be edited too. At Micro Edit, we can make minimum changes and add text or different effects. The photos have a maximum resolution of 2584 x 1938 pixels. They are clear in natural light. The colors are natural, and the environmental noise is a medium one.
As a mobile operating system, the phone has the Symbian S60 5th Edition. I do not have news about it. I will try only to show some applications that have left me a good impression.
As business applications, the phone has available the Office and PDF reader, a small notes editor, an archiver, a converter for various units of measure and a useful English Dictionary. We must not forget the calendar for meetings or the possibility to receive mail even in sync with an Exchange server.
Next, I like the default Symbian browser with Adobe Flash Lite support, one of the most complete, where we can watch without problems even the videos on Youtube. The resolution of 640 x 360 pixels is also quite ok for viewing in good conditions web pages. Along with the 3G modem, most of the web pages I have visited were loaded quickly and without errors.
As a proof of Nokia’s orientation to the consumer market, and by that I mean to our needs for fun and entertainment, the phone included some dedicated applications, especially social networks such as Hi5, Facebook or YouTube.
Nokia Ovi is actually a suite of applications, in which the manufacturers have merged about everything you need to do with a phone. You can access it, you can make a backup and synchronize it with your PC, you can manage contacts, you can browse the photo galleries and you can show them to your friends via the internet and even download Ovi maps when you need them.
In the end, I can conclude that the model N97 is the most "powerful", the smartest and most "full" of multimedia “goodies” smartphone currently available from the Finnish company. It is a functional device that can replace a laptop when you need one. You can access the Internet, read e-mails and documents but also listen to music or attend your favorite sites for social networking. Nokia N97 32GB is a device that can achieve the necessary balance between work and fun, occupation and hobbies.