Perhaps the friendliest DHL lady I have ever met delivered my Nokia N97 with US 3G from WOMworld. I did a live Qik recording of the unboxing, reaching the amazing milestone of 1 continuous viewer for the seven and a half minute unboxing.
Feel
I've held and played with an N97 before, so the solid construction and satisfying "snap" of opening and closing the phone was no surprise. Still, I love it.
I like the matte feel of the back cover. Some people like a sleek phone, but I get a better grip with the texture. The bottom sort of flares out and there is nothing wrong with this, but for grip purposes, I think this would have made more sense at the top.
Interface
Though it is not my primary device, I have used the Nokia 5800XM (firmware 20.x) quite a bit and am familiar with S50 5th edition. I immediately found the N97 more responsive on menus and switching the screen between portrait and landscape modes. The screen is also more responsive to my touch than the 5800 and I found I did not have to press as hard on the screen for it to register my input.
It took a couple tries to figure this out, but in addition to the usual locking mechanism via the side switch, the screen semi-locks when it goes dim. It does this in a way that a mere touch of the screen does not bring the phone back to life, but a press of the single button does. I like this feature. It lets me set the timeout for a long time, but when I forget to lock the phone and slip it in my pocket, I don't accidentally dial anyone.
The Homescreen
One of the best features of S60 phones is the massive amount of information they provide from just a quick glance at the screen. In 3rd edition, this is typically upcoming calendar entries, todos, current song, and in Eseries, recent email. 
But ever since the Diablo release of Maemo, I have been excited about homescreen widgets: a nearly neverending set of options for displaying information that you are really interested in. The N97 homescreen achieves this. Not perfectly, but better than anything I have seen yet, with the ability to customize the screen with your interests. This could be improved by adding something like the Eseries concept of 'modes', whereby I could change the entire information display by a single click; providing a contextual or time-of-day bias to the presented information.
But still, this level of customization and instant information is amazing, and I have not seen its equal like in any phone yet.
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QLauncher for Maemo!
6 days ago
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2 comments:
While I do agree with you the new homescreen is unlike anything we have seen before I think we have to look at the downside of this as well. Becauese its new and testing the waters we have discovered that the homescreen may very well be the cause of the low available RAM while using the device.
Its nothing new for us N97 users to complain about the meek amount of RAM available on the N97. Had Nokia simply taken the time to realize that this device was going to be more demanding than any other device to date they could have alleviated this problem from the very beginning.
Overall I still love the phone however its simply underpowered from its intended purpose. For the price they are asking for the NAM version its very hard to justify when compared to the competition. What do you think?
The homescreen can definitely cause the RAM problems. If you use the Facebook, Weather, and Gravity widgets, then those are all running at the same time. I've changed it up from the original setup so the only that I have that is "running" is the email, which I want going all the time anyway.
This has made a big difference in resource availability. I still do not understand why it was handicapped in this way, but that's how it is, sadly.
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