I am now an owner of a Nokia N97 for about four months and to be honest I’m quite disappointed, as many other N97 users. Since some weeks the touch screen is going from bad to unusable. A few weeks before the major firmware update (V20) the touch screen was already working poorly (sometimes Id touch and nothing would happen or other fewer times I was touching one point and it was selecting another).
Just after the firmware update it didn’t get much better, I was having the same problems besides the scrolling that would sometimes get into a loop or move the entries to out of the screen and make it impossible for me to select anything. I must admit that I have installed a bunch of applications and maybe thats one of the reasons for having a poor response from the phone. But in the other hand, I never heard of any friend that owns an Iphone complaining about the phone after installing applications. I’ll soon try to make factory reset and install everything again, but I really do not want to do this every 3 months…
In what it comes to applications, I haven’t been amazed with the current options, but I guess it is because so far I’m not yet amazed with mobile apps in general (even the ones that some friends that have Iphone have shown me). At the moment I have the following apps installed:
- Spotify for S60: I’m a fan of spotify and I am very happy with their app (except when the N97 itself fails). It is very useful, nice gui. The guys really though about what the user would need of a spotify app.
- Nokia Maps: I wanted to use google maps instead, but I enjoy the compass functionality and the last version of Google Maps for S60 I’ve tried didnt integrate the compass. The nokia maps is quite decent, and it has been greatly improved after the last firmware upgrade. Now it can “correct” misspelled addresses which is extremely useful, moreover the walk to options now seem to be free for use (why did they want to charge for that). Still, the handshake for starting the compass is annoying and I’d prefer to synchronize my points of interest without needing an OVI account. Overall, a mapping application is extremely useful and it is between the top 3 I use most.
- Opera Mini: I have installed both opera mini, opera mobile and the regular nokia browser. Opera Mobile is indeed very powerful but I was often having problems of memory full (though it was the only app open) and I havent used it lately. I have been mainly using Opera Mini which is very fast and very nice (thought selecting my emails in gmail can be quite challenging as the selection box is incredibly small and N97 touch screen is awful). Nokia’s browser doesnt seem bad, but Opera mini is faster, had a google search toolbar and has a nicer look and feel.
- Calendar and e-mail: As I use a lot google calendar and it is possible to synchronize google calendar with N97s calendar, it has been very useful for me. The e-mail with mail for exchange is not bad, but I noticed on moments I was online, that it was not synchronizing with e-mails I have received a few minutes before the synch. By the way, the whole process of installing the mail for exchange and configuring this synchronisms was not so straight forward, but this blog helped me quite a lot.
- Instant messaging: I have used installed and tried both Nimbuz and Fring, but to be honest I dont use that much instant messaging and I haven’t really seen if the applications are good enough.
- Facebook application: either I like or not, I’m a bit facebook addicted and hopefully N97 facebook application is really good. It provides a smart interface to check and reply incoming messages, friends request, wall and status updates.
- Twitter: I have the tweets60 tweeter client for the N97. I heard it is the best free twiter client for S60, but I dont like it that much (I guess thats the price you pay for not paying =D). It is quite slow (even when my N97 was working ok) and I dont like so much the interface.
- Camera: The camera of the device itself is awesome. I’m really happy with the resolution and any effects the camera may apply or correct on the pictures. Moreover, it is quite nice that it allows you to geotag, directly upload to facebook, send by email, etc.
I havent had much interest in other applications I heard about but I’d like a rss feed reader that I can synchronize with google reader. It would be awesome if google could provide an app for that, as the one that the people from nokiapp.com website have done still needs a bunch of UI improvements for my personal taste.
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