VC’s Techie CockTail

I got to play with Nokia’s flagship multimedia device N97 (as of now, since N900 seems to be creating a lot of buzz). This is the 2nd device with Symbian touchscreen S60 V5 support. First being the 5800 which I talked about a while ago.

• First and foremost I was impressed by the device which was smaller than I imagined (previous generation smartphones with slide out keypad used to look like a ‘geometry box’ to me)
• And at 150 grams its build quality seems solid and the slider mechanism robust and even though the phone’s owner dropping it down from some 5 feet all seems well
• Next is the full fledged keypad, even though the keys are small it was good to type with and the rubbery feel helps in this I feel
• The screen with its resolution of 640 x 360 pixels and 16 M colors was bright and pleasant to look at
• The phone working speed was also a pleasant surprise even though it was running only the V12 firmware
• I was amazed by the captured video quality with its 5 megapixel camera with carl zeiss optics. Still images were also good.
• One more thing that impressed me was its ability to directly play flv (flash video) files and also to zoom it and position it in the screen
• Some gripes like lack of kinetic scrolling and the single / double click and unable to setup a custom pop3 mail account was evident

At around 30,000 INR its a multimedia handheld computer with its keypad and smartphone capabilities being its trump card, but still there are other competitors like Samsung Omnia HD , Sony Ericsson Satio both excellent multimedia devices but no keypad.

written by Vignesh \\ tags: n97, Nokia