Few days with the Nokia N97: Top 5 pros and cons

I’ve been using the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N97 for more than a week now. Those who live under the rock should know it’s the Finnish giant’s flagship device for this year, but just how powerful it is – is a different story. In this first article I’ll try to emphasize its top 5 pros and cons. Let’s roll…

Top 5 pros:

1. Great form factor – I always dreamed of having a QWERTY keyboard equipped NSeries device. Adding a touchscreen in the equation made things even better.
2. Solid camera – I consider N97’s competition to be such phones as the HTC Touch Pro and some other Windows Mobile devices with the same form factor. The camera that’s in the N97 leaves the competition far behind thanks to its Carl Zeiss optics.
3. Customizable home screen – at the moment I have my top 4 contacts, top 8 apps, calendar and the current weather information on the N97’s homescreen. All of that is easily accessible with a single press of a screen.
4. Multimedia – NSeries was always strong on multimedia. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) fan boys are all proud that the iPhone 3GS can take 640×480 video at 30 fps; NSeries device could do that for more than 3 years now, starting with the Nokia N93.
5. Good selection of pre-installed apps – virtually everything you could possibly need comes pre-installed with the device — including mobile office suite (QuickOffice), navigation app (Nokia Maps), browser, and so on. Some things are missing, but that’s in the cons list.

The cons continue after the jump…

Top 5 cons:

1. Keyboard – you’ve probably heard this before, but unfortunately, it’s worth repeating. The keyboard is awful, and it’s not just because dot and comma share the same key, it’s also the fact that the shift is located in the same part (left) as the D-pad, which BTW I love, making text selection pretty hard, to say the least. I don’t understand why some lower-end devices like the E75 have better keyboards than the company’s flagship phone.
2. Camera – as you can see this is both in my top pros and cons. Don’t get me wrong, I think 5 megapixel camera is enough. But when you think about it, the N95 which was Nokia’s flagship device for 2007 had a camera with same megapixel count. Go figure.
3. Slowness – CPU can’t handle the job properly. I wish things are moving faster, but they are not. Actually, I’m not sure whether it’s CPU thing or lack of RAM (there are 128MB of RAM in the N97), but some things need to change. When I press some button or change the screen orientation, the phone should react immediately.
4. UI/Symbian – although I like the homescreen, UI is everything but intuitive. It’s the small things that annoy me. For some things a single press of an icon is enough, whereas for some others you need to press two times. In addition, when I connect on the WiFi network, I don’t want to be asked on and on about which network should an application use.
5. Ovi Store – this isn’t exactly a bad thing of the N97 per se, but it’s related, nonetheless. For one thing, when I want to customize the homescreen and I click on “Download content,” Ovi Store should show me only those apps which come with homescreen widget. Moreover, Facebook should come pre-installed with the device and the same goes for some weather information application, which comes with a homescreen widget — these, at least, haven’t come pre-installed on the N97 I got.

UPDATE: Facebook app comes pre-installed on the Nokia N97, it just wasn’t there on the one I got!

That’s about all I had to say for this post. I’ll leave my final judgment for the final article. Stay tuned in the meantime…