Last night, after a long hike and massive grill-out, I was able to attend a "Drinks with Nokia" event and play with the upcoming N97 a little bit. As I was thinking about the interface and some features, I rememberd my now seldom-used N800 Internet tablet running Maemo. A great feature of the tablet was the desktop -or, "home screen"- could have some apps running on it with information or control. Examples include: weather forecast, music player (with now playing and controls), and contacts and their availability. The home screen could also be placed into edit mode in which you can select visible applications and drag them around to rearrange them. The N97 features this exact same design, and this is a great step forward for a mobile phone. The more information I can get with a quick glance, the better, and this design really packs an informational punch.
The other thing that struck me was the new "software updater" tool. As I understand it, this will be built-in to the N97, although I saw it running on a 5800. Like an Over the Air (OTA) update, launching this app tells you about available updates to the built-in components (like Maps, Flash and Share Online). I don't know about notifications, but this is how the Diablo release of Maemo handles updates to the software components. No need for a full image flash; instead, just update the components that have available updates. It's a great system and I am happy to see this on a phone.
As I understand it, the the N97 will come with Maps 2.0 installed by default; the device I played with did indeed still have Maps 2.0 running. But by launching this updater app, you can quickly and easily upgrade to Maps 3 without the need for a computer or navigating to a website. Slick!
Monday, June 08, 2009
N97 takes lessons from Maemo
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5 comments:
A nice and expensive bottle of water goes well with a nice and also very expensive device! ;-)...Interestingly enough Voss is a Norwegian export product and is not sold here (Oslo, Norway), at least the first N97s are hopefully showing up in the stores here soon.
Haha, the Voss was someone else's (a Nokia employee, actually). I stuck with Bourbon and ginger for the evening (which happens to be made and sold in the US :)
:-)..I would have totally chosen the same had I been given the choice (Bourbon). Speaking of the N97, what is the browser speed like compared to the browser on the N96 for example? That's always my main concern since I use my phones for web browsing a lot.
I can't really compare those, sorry. Never used an N96 and I mostly just played with the interface for a few minutes.
They didn't have SIMs in them, but I popped mine in (These were EUR versions, so I had only Edge) and used the Facebook app. It was a bit snappier than on the 5800, but that is not a real test.
I think (but am not positive) that the webkit version is the same on FP2 phones, so it should operate similar to an N96. My E75 (also 3rd ed, FP2) runs webpages pretty quickly if there is not too much flash on them. The fact that it supports flash, and many websites don't "tone it down" on media-rich sites, can be a real slowdown sometimes.
I asked for a comparison with the N96 but should have actually reformulated and said something like the other N series devices. My impression is that the browser on the E series is a bit snappier to begin with. For some reason it feels that my wife's E66 is a bit faster rendering pages then either my N78 or N96. Yes, totally agree that the media-rich sites kill any joy of browsing on a cell phone. For the most part I have javascript set to off and I never download flash content. That speeds up the thing a bit.
Thanks for the answer. :)
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