Nokia N97
by Alistair Phillips on 7 December, 2008
In what can only be described as a odd move, Nokia have decided to announce their newest flagship phone – a full 6 months before it launches! Must be what’s called commercial suicide for a company to do something like this just before the festive season? But perhaps we need to trust in the fact that Nokia knows better (yeah right!)…
The Nokia N97 does appear to be quite an impressive phone and from initial glances looks remarkably similar to the Sony Ericsson X1. Featuring all the yummy goodness of a 16:9 touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, 32GB storage and 5-megapixel camera it sure ticks most of the boxes for the fanatics. But and the end of the day it’s still, sadly, a Nokia S60 (5th edition) phone and we cant help but wonder if it will be any different from all the others. No details have been released regarding the CPU and onboard memory so it might very well suffer from the usual sluggishness that is Nokia.
It’s a slider phone much like the Sony Ericsson X1 but instead of the smart curved design the SE came up with it looks like the N97 folds up slightly on hinges. Our best are that this would be the first thing to fail on this unit. The active desktop is customisable and has nice social features like having RSS feeds, pictures of your top contacts and currently playing tracks all only a touch away. Widgets all over so should be extremely configurable with Nokia and 3rd party items. To be fair these points are based on pre-production models as shipments are expect to arrive in Q1 / H1 2009. A fair while away indeed, so you’ll need to stay tuned to hear if this will be the iPhone killer.
