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Fuzzy Logic Nokia N97 officially launched, Ovi Store clocks up 20,000 apps
Fuzzy Logic Nokia N97 officially launched, Ovi Store clocks up 20,000 apps | Nokia N97 officially launched, Ovi Store clocks up 20,000 apps |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 01 July 2009 | |
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The N97 is unquestionably Nokia’s best and most advanced handset yet, offering a familiar 3.5-inch resistive touch screen, able to work with finger tips, fingernails and a stylus, unlike Apple’s capacitive touch screen which works with finger tips only. That said, Apple still has the trump card of a multi-touch interface, something only Palm, LG and Chinese iPhone-clone makers have been able to copy, brilliantly in the case of the Palm Pre, well enough in the LG Arena and relatively woefully (but still multi-touch!) in those yum- cha iPhone-clones. Nokia, why won’t you let us multi-touch your screens? Apple says it has patented multi-touch to the hilt, but what do Palm and LG know that you don’t? Even so, single touch is quite effective for most purposes and finally, Nokia has a successor to the Nokia 5800 series touch-screen phone with a bigger screen and an improved Symbian S60 5th Edition OS. Today was the first time I laid my hands on the N97, which Nokia previewed several months ago. In one sense, early knowledge of Nokia’s devices is fantastic, but it is a shame it has taken until now for the N97 to truly be made widely available to end-users in Australia. Imagine if the N97 was available for Christmas last year, around the time we first heard of it? Having read several N97 reviews, with some wishing the keyboard had more “travel” when pressing the keys, others wondering why the on-screen QWERTY keyboard had to be deleted from the OS when it worked perfectly well on the similar 5800-series device (despite the presence of an actual keyboard) and wishing the N97 was a bit faster, I was keen to see it for myself. The very first thing I looked at was the angle of the screen when opened. While it seemed ok to me, with a Nokia representative noting during the launch that Nokia's engineers worked hard to decide on the right angle, I've read comments from people who wished they could adjust the screen to a wide range of angles, much like the new Windows Mobile powered HTC Touch HD 2. And why not? Angles are a personal thing, people are of different heights, neck lengths, eye positions in one's face... can a universal angle truly be possible on such a small device? Perhaps angle choice will emerge in a future N98 or 99. The very second thing I noticed was that the home screen “widgets” did NOT spin around 90 degrees when the handset itself was turned from a vertical to a horizontal position. This cute graphical spinning of the widgets was something the very first official Nokia N97 video showed several months ago, and looked very cool indeed. Seeing the real N97 in vertical mode turned horizontal just fade to a blue screen and then display the widgets in a horizontal position was a bit of a disappointment, frankly. After all, graphical eye candy is always welcome in our digital devices, so we were teased with it and then delivered a blue screen. We all know that blue screens from Microsoft often indicate "death", so why a light-ish blue was even chosen (let alone NOT showing the lovely spinning animation) is a bit beyond me, but then what do I know? I’m only a technology journalist, not a phone hardware/software creator. When it comes down to it, however, the lack of a spinning animation (with animations long part of Nokia’s user interfaces) isn’t the be-all and end-all of the N97. Actual usage and the utility of the home screen widgets - and the rest of the device itself - is far more important. Please read on to page 2 to continue! |
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