N97: I Saw, I Touched, I Came Away Mildly Impressed...

Make sure not to miss some of the only video in the world of the new Nokia N97, alive and in the wild, here on The National's website. We also have a story up - big point being, this wannabe iPhone killer will hit UAE shelves before almost any other country in the world.

Having had a pretty solid play with the N97 - which Nokia were keen to remind me, was still a trial version - I have the following observations that  I would like to share:


(Disclosure: I love my iPhone in a way that it is hard to express in words. I believe all other phones are basically garbage. But I try to be fair, honestly I do.)

1) Resistive touch screens are no good.

(As a backgrounder, resistive touchscreens work by placing two layers of conductive film together over the screen. When your press them together, they register a touch. This is the system used by Nokia as well as pretty much every touchscreen phone maker. Capacitive touchscreens have one electrically charged surface, they sense the small electrical charge of your fingertip to register a touch. This is what is used by the iPhone.)

So the downside of the iPhone-style touchscreen is that it only recognises fingertips - you can't use a stylus, or any other object, or your fingers covered in mittens, etc. But the downside of the N97-style screen is worse - it just doesn't work with the slickness and smoothness of the iPhone - and it cannot register more than one touch at the same time.

As anyone who has used an iPhone for web browsing knows, no multitouch is a real deal breaker, especially for zooming in/out of web pages, and typing fast on a virtual keyboard. The N7 comes with a physical keyboard too, but typing on the virtual one is going to feel like typing with one finger.

Even in the video, you will see the N97 responding to touches in a fairly haphazard way, with the Nokia guy often having to touch again for a second or third time to have it register. Not good enough, I'm affraid

2) You really make a lot of sacrifices owning an iPhone

The N97 has great speakers, an inbuilt radio transmitter (meaning you can listen to your music in the car, without a car kit), a high-res camera that takes nice video and a 32 gig hard drive with an extra memory card slot. It is probably safe to say that you won't see any of these in an iPhone anytime this decade (although the hard drives will likely get bigger.)

Becoming an iPhone lover is all about drinking the kool-aid and pretending that none of this really matters, just like hardcore Apple fans will tell you that having a second mouse button is no big deal. But in the cold light of day, it is hard not to wish for a few more hardware tweaks to the iPhone.

3) Bring on the Ovi Store

This seems like a real make or break type of thing for the N97. The whole widgets idea - basically the N97's equivalent of applications, but displaying live content right on the home screen - is really cool, and the few widgets I saw, like the two for Reuters and Bloomberg news, were excellent (check out the cool Reuters "news as a picture slideshow" application in the video - it has potential).

But what will make the difference is how many more of them will follow, how many developers get in on the game, and how lively the Ovi Store - Nokia's equivelant of the iTunes app store - becomes. That will be one of the biggest tests for the N97, and for Nokia's cred as a company that makes AWESOME phones, not just lots of them.