I’m no Nokia basher, in fact until very recently, I would only buy Nokia phones for myself, my wife or children. I come to this from a line of Nokia phones, the most recent of which was the N95 8GB
This, I thought, was a great phone and I used it heavily for a wide range of tasks. In addition to being a phone, it became indispensable as my calendar, address book, still and movie camera, music player, movie player, games machine, route planner, document viewer, VoIP phone, quick web browser and WiFi access point. That’s an impressive list from one little box of electronics – and that’s just the really important stuff.
It was such a useful little gadget that it was never out of arms reach.
However, many applications were awkward or downright impractical on its numeric keyboard. A qwerty was required.
So it was with considerable anticipation that I received the announcement of the N97. A qwerty keyboard and a touch screen: the potential to be the perfect phone.
Nokia N97
After months of waiting past shifting launch dates, I eventually got my N97 from the Nokia Online Shop, paying the full early adopters fee of £500.
The keyboard is a huge disappointment. They keys have no travel whatsoever, feedback is hopeless but more importantly and an utterly unforgivable cock-up is that you can’t read the key legends. How hard is it to use two high-contrast colours for the keys and legends? Too hard for Nokia, it seems. In anything but perfect light (or darkness when back illumination comes to the rescue), you can’t see which key is which. This wouldn’t be so bad on a standard QWERTY keyboard where all but a novice has a rough idea where things are but this three row effort has everything except the main alpha keys scattered all over the place. You end up having to arrange secondary lighting just so you can send a text. How the hell did they manage to get it so wrong?
The whole system is slow, unresponsive and buggy. I’m told I should expect this, it is version 1, after all. What rubbish! I don’t pay extra to get one of the first phones available so that I can spend my time testing it. (This is a wider industry problem which I won’t dig up now.) Nokia should be utterly ashamed of itself for releasing software that is simply not finished. A good example of this is switching on the screen. You can use either the key lock switch: screen comes on quickly; or open the phone to use the keyboard: screen comes on after a long wait.
The user interface shows many signs of being in a transition between keyboard and touch operated and with a lack of agreement on how to complete the process. Scrolling is achieved variously by grabbing a scrollbar with your finger or swiping up and down on the page. You won’t know whether swiping will work in an application until you try it. Similarly, there is no consistency in choosing items from lists. Sometimes a single tap works; in other places you need to tap twice.
The phone was promoted as being an ideal media device with its huge storage space and long battery life. Unfortunately, it fails spectacularly here too. The volume control is hopelessly unresponsive and sometimes simply fails to operate at all. Cataloguing your music collection after copying tracks to the phone takes forever but the real peach is using Bluetooth. If you listen to your music on Bluetooth speakers it is virtually impossible to answer calls. This phone, unlike others, doesn’t recognise a split between phone audio and media audio and pumps it all through the speakers. If your speakers don’t have a microphone, you have to disconnect them before you can talk to the caller using the phone’s mic. Trying to do that after answering a call takes so long that the caller has usually hung up. The problem is made worse by various pop-up messages about the phone’s state appearing over the on-screen buttons so you have to wait for them to slide away before you can continue. It’s an utter shambles.
The other major feature pushed on this phone was its Internet capabilities. It has a good browser that rarely struggled to render a modestly sized page but will get bogged down in large or complex ones, responding very slowly. Again, attention to glaring problems has been poor. While it’s downloading a page there is a status bar along the top of the screen. This vanishes when the page is complete causing the page to jump upwards to fill the gap. If you’ve already aimed a tap at a link, you’re going to miss it and hit something underneath. If they had simply made the status bar overlay the page instead of displacing it, the problem wouldn’t occur. Sounds like a minor problem until you tap the wrong link in search results and end up on a huge page that takes ages to render before you can go back and try again. It adds minutes to simple tasks.
And, of course, the browser crashes. How it can crash and lock the whole phone is a mystery but it does and it makes a habit of it. Battery removal is the only remedy here.
There are many more problems, like network connection being a bit of a gamble when switching between WiFi and GPRS. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you end up using mobile data when WiFi is available. Often you end up with no connection at all. The constant warnings that your mobile data connection might get expensive. Is that OK? Yes. Just get on with it. Why can’t it ask once and remember the answer?
Installing software is torture. Mostly it works but is so slow it is best left to run overnight. But on the occasions that it doesn’t work, you get a useless message about there not being enough memory with no clue as to what you’re supposed to do about it. Have I got too many programs running? Have I filled the flash drive? (Surely not, it’s 32GB and I haven’t started yet.) You’re left most unsatisfactorily with just switching off and on again to cure the problem.
I really wanted to like this phone but it was determined not to let me. In the end I found it frustrating and annoying to use and had to get rid of it.
