Gadgets Blog: Unusual Gift Ideas

My Thoughts On The Nokia N97

As you may recall it was my birthday last week, and after an unfortunate delay I finally received my shiny new Nokia N97 on the morning of, and indeed like a birthday present in fact. I have of course been playing with my new toy profusely for the week or so that I’ve had it, and so I thought I’d share my thoughts with you.

If you have read anything about the N97 since release you have most likely encountered some of the software glitches that people appear to be experiencing en mass. Now, I’m not sure if some of these people have different software versions to me, or maybe branded handsets, (as an early adopter on Orange I was lucky enough to get an un-branded phone) but other than a couple of very minor niggles I can find very few faults with the handset myself. In fact, from the wealth of issues people claim to be experiencing the only two problems I have had issue with are:

• When ‘unlocking’ the handset using the slide button on the side, quite often the backlight will not come on first go, so the handset needs to be locked and unlocked again.
• After a prolonged period left on standby the widgets on the front page will cease to respond, and although you can still access the applications through the menu system, if you want to re-activate the widgets, the handset will need to be turned off and on again.I can put up with these niggles, and am assured that when the software update becomes available here in the UK that these will be addressed.

On to the plus points of the handset and I wonder where to start. It’s already replaced my iPod in the car for playing music, its 32GB of memory is more than enough for me. Any tracks I have imported into iTunes on my PC are easy enough to transfer to the phone via USB, Bluetooth, or over a network connection using one of the included applications. Of course the £20 of free downloads didn’t hurt its cause in that respect either. I have an adaptor for my car stereo, but if I didn’t I could always use the built in FM transmitter.

I haven’t had much of a play with the camera as of yet, I’m not really one for snapping at any given opportunity, as well as the fact it was my Birthday weekend so I was rather caught up in the revelry rather than taking photo’s, but with the playing I’ve done it compares favourably to the similar quality (Mega pixel wise) camera on my old N95. The keyboard is a joy to use, and this really helps it out, as it makes entering text a lot easier than using the touch screen interface as other phones do.

Last night was the key moment in my experience with the N97 however. At a pub quiz we got talking about the new series of Torchwood, and all my friends are saying how good it is. For those that don’t know they are showing a 5 part mini series on BBC1 at 9 o’clock every night this week. So upon returning home I downloaded the first part to my N97 using the included BBC iPlayer application. This took only 8 minutes to download a 60 minute episode to the memory of my phone, so I can now watch it anywhere, and I was highly impressed with both the video and audio quality the phone was giving me.

At the end of the day this really is a feature packed phone, I haven’t even got started on the Maps, Email, streaming video, ability to show flash files so you really can get the whole of the internet on this phone, and various other capabilities this phone has. It might not be as instantly lovable, to some, as the likes of the iPhone, but with just a little perseverance I personally feel this is a much better option.