Better than iPhone? Nokia’s N97 Might Be!
Posted on January 5, 2009 by admin Under Phones · 2 Comments
Nokia’s N97 just might have the features and advancement to beat the Apple iPhone. which the New York press peeked at last night. The 3G phone has a full-body touchscreen that slides up when in landscape mode, just like the Sony Xperia, to expose a full QWERTY keyboard and also has virtual keypads and keyboards on the touchscreen.
The phone’s distinctive feature is a customizable home screen. Just like the Apple OSX or Windows Vista, for example, the N97 supports “widgets”, which are small programs or links to programs that provide snippets of information, such as the latest Facebook updates or the weather forecast. Users can organize the widgets that appear on the home screen by dragging and dropping to the way they like. The resistive LCD screen does pickup finger input fairly well and supports a few cool gestures like “flicking” up and down to move through a list of songs in the music player application or side to side to scroll through photos.
The rest of the N97’s features may not be the top of the line but Nokia did increase the ante in specs. The iPhone, for example, has a max of 16 gigabytes of built-in memory. The N97 comes with 32 gigabytes built-in and a MicrSD slot to add up to 16GB more. At 640 by 360 pixels and a 3.5-inch LCD, it has 1.5 times the detail of the Apple iPhone or Google’s G1 and a bit more than the Blackberry Storm. And it’s browser supports flash which allowes it to display video from sites like Youtube or Hulu as well as many other modern Web sites that don’t work on other Web-browsing phones. The N97 has a built-in five-megapixel camera that takes still pictures at five megapixels and DVD resolution for video recording (640 by 480 pixels).
The phone comes with assisted GPS but also has a compass that automatically turns maps to the right direction which was a feature Nokia first introduced on another phone earlier this year. It also updates user’s coordinates to share with friends which was a feature we first saw on the Helio Ocean about two years ago. Nokia calls this new service “social location” or “So-Lo”.
Nokia also added Maps 3.0, which includes topo maps and 3-D maps with famous landmarks for 200 cities. With Nokia’s Ovi Internet service, users can plan their trips on a PC which are automatically synched to their phones. They can also share and save routes they have taken with other users.
All these great feautres don’t come cheap. The N97 will sell for about 550 Euro ($700 USD) on its own. It will be cheaper with a carrier subsidy, but Nokia isn’t saying whether if AT&T or T-Mobile will carry it (as a GSM phone, those are the two options for it in the US). Nokia hasn’t even confirmed that the phone will operate on US 3G network, but that’s a safe bet. Though it does have built-in Wi-Fi (802.11g), without a available broadband connection, the Internet-focused N97 would feel as useful as a brick.
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ill take the N97 over the iphone anyday
cant wait to get my hands on the device