Finally bought a smartphone, first time to have one actually. My former phone is a Sony Ericsson K810i, used it for around 2 years plus plus. Very sturdy phone but the mediocre support for connectivity is really hurting me since I need a good 3g connection for my mobile office. Initially was planning to buy an iphone 3gs but got really disappointed by the bad battery life, then decided to go for a blackberry bold, but my provider screwed me on that one. So upon hearing about the Nokia N97 (especially the very cool 32gb of internal memory which is expandable upto 48gb), I decided to jump back to the Nokia bandwagon after being away for such a very long time. Credit goes to Sony Ericsson for not releasing any good smartphone (the xperia x1 sucks really bad).

So first things first, this phone is jam packed with features; ranging from all sorts of connectivity options to a built in fm transmitter for your car when listening to mp3s. I really love the cool form factor and the overall feel of the hardware; although for a phone that is pack with features, it only comes with 128mb of ram which rans out quite often especially when using the built in email client. The web browser uses the WebKit rendering engine (similar to Safari), and it has support for Flash (Lite)! Opening big sites can slow down the phone considerably, but most of the time you’ll default to the mobile version of the site (if they have one). One of the things I love is the homescreen widgets, basically it allows you to put widgets (sort of like a summarize version of an application) and allow the phone to periodically update them automatically, this can be emails, tweets, facebook, weather, or news sites. Basically any application that has support for widgets (maximum of 5 can be put into the homescreen). The usual applications for symbian also applies like adobe pdf, microsoft office, etc. Although the OVI store is really bad, you can still search the net for symbian apps and download it to your phone.

The real downside of this superb phone is the OS, Symbian S60 5th Edition, needless to say its downright slow and laggy, although according to some sources new firmwares are gonna be released to address the numerous bugs of the phone. Firmwares, now there’s another issue, N97 updates are quite unpredictable, meaning that some users in a different region (sometimes same regions) get them, some don’t, now according to Nokia, each region or operator (telecom) usually has some customizations for that firmware that’s why they can’t roll them out all at once to everybody. This maybe true or not we won’t know for sure, but some users are reporting delays in weeks (sometimes in months) between updates. Like me for example, Nokia has already released v12 but i’m still at v11 and unable to update over the air or using their Nokia Software Updater. Its frustrating knowing that there is already a fix to speed up or fix stuff, but you can’t update because you have to wait for your region or operator to get it.

Ranting aside, if you can look past the lagginess of the UI and the use of a resistive touch screen (which means you have to press harder in order for the input to register), you’ll find a very solid phone in the current incarnation of Nokia’s flagship smartphone.