Nokia N97 Sneak peek

Nokia India has conducted a bloggers' meet up at Oberoi today to discuss about their visions and thoughts behind developing its much hyped N97, which is supposed to hit markets soon.

Axel meyer, the global head of design for Nokia Nseries has turned up at the event as the keynote speaker. He has talked about the device and displayed the device live.

The world's largest mobile phone manufacturer is now trying hard to catch attention through different channels in different ways. Be it organising hack-a-thon at jillians in USA, which is very near to Apple's WWDC center(where iphone 3gs was launched yesterday) and providing free coffee to WWDC's attendees at nearby starbucks stores before the keynote speech started or be it trying to communicate to the blog readers in India by tying to embrace the blogging community before the launch of its flagship smartphone N97.

Well, with a clear intention of developing yet another iPhone killer after the flop show of N96, Nokia is coming ahead with this new smartphone.

To review the new phone from my hands-on experience...

• I should say, Nokia has done a good job this time on the design end. the new phone is complete touch enabled with a slider QWERTY key board. The screen actually slides first and then tilts to 35degrees, which seems to be the feature which seemed to me as radically different and new from the existing smartphones in the market.
• In the two coulour options, White looked richer and premium than the black version.
• The home screen is good with customisable widgets.
• The thing which is very important and which remained same from the previous phones and which disappointed me is the internet browser. It's pretty much same as 5800 and not so user friendly using touch interface.
• The touch capability is still not perfect and is definitely not as fluid as iphone.
• It has a great camera & flash with 5mp clarity and DVD quality video capturing capability but took little much time processing after a picture is clicked.
• The OS and the applications still has a very long way to go before it could compete with that of Apple.
• It has a great memory storage with a capacity of 32 GB.
• Assuming that the devices were charged before the event kicked off, the battery back up was not so convincing with most of the devices running out of battery by the end of the show(though many people played around with it continuously, 3-4 hrs is not satisfactory with out even switching on 3g and wifi)

Overall, I would say its a better phone than the previous ones from nokia and would rate it 7 on a scale of 10. I would say its good but definitely not enough to compete with the iphone 3g and now, with the introduction of new iphone 3gS it could be even tougher for N97.