smartphones

I have been using the Nokia N97 for almost a month now. Tried and tested in almost every manner [of course other than the drop, crash and burn tests] and to be honest I love the device. Primarily the design, it has the touch screen that is so in and a very elegant physical keyboard that is one reason why I dislike touch only phone, a.k.a iPhone and the likes. Just to run down on some key aspects of the device:

Overall the device wins my votes given that I haven’t really liked Nokia’s smartphone for they were never really appealed to me and were pretty slow to do almost all the work. This one is sleek, efficient and helps me do the one thing I love doing, browse the Web with ease. I will go about briefly explaining the key features of the phone below:

Touch Screen + Physical Keyboard

The touch interface is nothing close to what you will get on the iPhone and HTC and like all their attempts to introduce a flow sense with touch Nokia only succeeds in being very sticky. But it is better than what I had anticipated, of course I would have loved the device if it had motion sensor and four way screen shifting. The integration of a physical keyboard was a very good move and Nokia should stick to those as it makes browsing and typing really effective. I have also used their latest Express Music, which is the same thing minus the keyboard and other functions [of course the cost too] but without the keyboard, the device is an ultimate fail.

Applications

It is Symbian and we all know how much we miss out on apps when it comes to these. The Ovi Store just began and there isn’t much it has to offer in terms of quality. It does have your apps for Facebook, Twitter for social networking, the ever reliable AccuWeather for weather checks and Cricinfo for sports [cricket] but it isn’t really that diverse in categories. Again the issue as always is that Nokia has been late at getting to supply what is in demand when it comes to smartphones. And I am talking about users like me who pay any price to get a really loaded device. But as I said that the concept of an app store for Nokia/Ovi has just gone live and it will take time before developers actually pay heed and produce apps in bulk. In short it has all the apps that are so typical of Nokia, very corporate in use and feel. Oh other than the Facebook app, which in my opinion is way better than the ones you have on the BlackBerry and even the iPhone. Again the major advantage is the powerful browsing experience and the correct hardware to take advantage of.

Maps

Perfect, the screen size and Nokia Maps make your life easy as anything. The winning aspect? Well load those maps once and you don’t have to download the maps over and over again, like you have to on Google Maps. This means once you do download the maps of a city, these can be cached on your device and loaded right from it, saving you a few bucks each month on roaming and downloading.

Other than that the interface is pretty sleek and efficient, however what I found troubling was accessing the menu once the maps are on, you really have to press that menu out by clicking the side of the screen. Also is should try and bring a search and introduce something like the single field that we have on Google Maps, the only issue I have presently is that it is not possible to mark your destination or your center directly on the maps.

Camera

Awesome, the 5 Mega Pixel camera beats the crap out of the many camera phones, including those from Nokia in the earlier models. The still images are superb along with the flash. I have used N93 and in its time it had the best result ever, but the quality of images was crap out doors. This one does a great job anywhere and you can see some photos that I took with it in my album [never mind, I am not a pro photographer]. But I seriously found Video quality quite inferior, this needs a check.