Why did I choose the Nokia N97?
It's one of the most agonising decisions I make each year. And also one of the most pleasant and fun. Choosing which smartphone is going to be my swiss army knife for the week away in the wilds. I know, I know, the clever gadgeteer would take a camera, a camcorder, an ebook reader, etc. All optimised for a single task. But I always, but always go for the converged solution - simply because I can. And because I want to test out the converged lifestyle as aggressively as I can before I evangelise it with the same aggression to my (ahem) interested public.
Up to the wire, it was a toss up between:
- the perennial Nokia E90 (deemed just too old, it's rubbish at general video watching)
- the Motorola Milestone (Android, but terrible, terrible keyboard)
- the Samsung i8910 HD (with HX8 firmware, very usable, but the instability of the Ovi Maps port (shhhh) was a dealbreaker - on a holiday, I need to be able to navigate reliably, plus the OLED screen wouldn't fare too well in all the outdoors activities)
- the Nokia N86 (superb camera and video, but for intensive catch-up-with-world activity and for video watching, that screen is arguably too small. Plus the aforementioned OLED concern)
Somewhat surprisingly, I turned to the trusty Nokia N97. I'm not sure why I just used the word "trusty", actually, since it has let me down as a long term device again and again. But I had a hunch this time that everything would be alright.... [postscript: fat chance]
I've been over the device's pros many times before, but briefly: decent qwerty keyboard, large 3.5" transflective display, protected camera glass, 'hero' battery, FM transmitter, huge internal disk. And you won't need reminding on all the N97's flaws, though I'll touch on them below, I suspect.
As part of setting up the N97 for a major trip, I made the deliberate decision to completely and utterly avoid Nokia Messaging. It may work well on other devices with some free system disk space, but it's an unmitigated disaster on the N97. Avoid Nokia Messaging (and other frippery like Ovi Contacts and Python etc) and the N97's quite stable and usable, in terms of C: disk space, my device ran happily at about 22MB free, even with web pages cached and with all my PIM data on-board, etc.
What did it survive?
- Water - one part of holidaying in the UK is that it's certain to be raining at least half the time. Often when you're out and about and at the mercy of the elements. And in my case, the only way to get even a 2G/GPRS signal, for email and Twitter checks, was to climb the nearest hill two or three times a day and stand in the wind and rain, just to suck in those precious wireless digits.
Thus, I found myself using the N97 in the full rain (not pouring, but certainly drizzling). And it didn't bat an eyelid. The sealed keyboard's one huge benefit is that it's essentially waterproof. The other thing is that the N97 is now so badly thought of, I considered the device expendable should it refuse to work in the rain - but it survived!
- Dust/sand - again a necessary evil part of holidays - beaches and cliffs and so on. Sand is a natural enemy to consumer electronics - and, to be fair, there wasn't that much being blown about where I was this year. I do remember, on a week on the South Coast in a very sandy area, once borrowing Rafe's 'sealed' and 'almost indestructible' Nokia 6650 for the week, to try and keep my precious E90, with all its hundreds of entry points, from the sand in the air.
- Sun - ah yes. Not so much heating effects from the sun (hey, this was the UK), but visibility in it. So many times I try top end devices for review and, however clever their internals, they're often spoiled by a screen that you just can't see when outdoors in the sun - which is exactly when you want to be outdoors with your smartphone, taking snaps, communicating, and so on. A big fail for any screen tech that's not at least aware of Le Soleil. The N97's display did pretty well, despite the contrast reduction from the resistive screen layer, and at no point did I ever have to squint to read the screen.
- Knocks and drops - when thinking about the N97's hinge mechanism, robustness is not something that instantly spring to mind. But, as I reported back on day one, early last year, the hinge's 'bits' (excuse the technical term) are made out of alloy and much stronger than they look. Somewhat clumsily, in all the to-ing and fro-ing, I managed to drop the N97 twice during the week, both times from waist height, once onto concrete. The battery cover popped off and the battery jumped out, but I replaced it and the device seemed perfect, with hardly a scratch.
- Time - yes, the battery is worth a mention. Not just because the BP-4L is Nokia's best battery (and at 1500mAh) but also because it's used in so many other Nokia phones that I was able to raid my cupboard and have two 'spares', fully charged, ready to do at all times. This aspect of battery life - having multiple devices with interchangeable batteries - is often overlooked, but it can be a life saver - at least for a phone freak like me 8-)
It's also worth noting that because of the aforementioned signal problems, out in the country where I was, I had to use the N97 a lot in Flight mode, to stop it trying really hard to contact a cell tower (that I knew was out of line of sight) and wasting lots of battery power in the process. Balanced against that, when I was in sight of a tower and in 'General' mode, the N97 was still having to work pretty hard to keep a data connection going, so it wasn't all plain sailing for battery life. No complaints overall though.
All of which sounds pretty positive so far - and the N97 did - just about - get me through a week away and accomplish most things I wanted it to do. Most. Not all. There were three big showstoppers, right at the end of the week, that had me scurrying for my other phones the second I got back!
Showstoppers
One highlight of the holiday was going to a services 'rescue' day (you know, life boats, helicopters, etc) - a typical 'once a year highspot' that I really wanted to capture using my N97 with its much vaunted Carl Zeiss optics. I know I've criticised the N97's camera in the past for having no preset focus in video capture mode, i.e. I'd thought it was focussed on infinity. Turns out I was wrong. It's just complete rubbish.
Having shot about half an hour of helicopters and winchmen and rescue launches, I reviewed the footage after the holiday on the big screen of my Mac and found that it was all fairly unusable, with no crispness, masses of artefacts, etc. A complete waste of time. It's possible that I've been spoilt by the HD video cameras in recent devices, but I don't think so - the N86, also with VGA capture, would have made a far, far better job of a relatively simple video task.
The second showstopper was, somewhat predictably, RAM. Yes, I know you're all going to point at my article: How to: Optimise RAM on the Nokia N97 (and N97 mini) in which I proudly showed how many apps I could run at the same time. But it only took a few days in the (wild) west of the UK with real world use, with real world data, to show that (as I'm sure you've seen for yourself) RAM is still an issue on these Nokia S60 5th Edition phones. At least when you push them as I did.
I don't consider that I did anything out of the ordinary. Having Gmail and Gravity running all the time was a must, plus I then wanted to fire up the Camera, take some photos or video, and then switch across to Gallery to review the results (and to let the app build all its tiny little thumbnails). Not too stiff a task, but trying this usage after a day or so of 'uptime' after a reboot, I inevitably ground to a halt on this last task. I didn't get any 'Out of memory' errors, to be fair, but the screen draw lag in Gallery was evidence enough that something inside the smartphone was running out at a rate of knots - and my finger's pointing at RAM.
The third showstopper was embarassing. Both for me and for Nokia. I loaded up Gallery, brought up the first of my holiday snaps, and then handed the N97 to my sister. "Just swipe to the left" I said confidently. She swiped, tentatively. Nothing. "Press a bit harder", I said, "it's got a resistive screen". "A what?" said my sister, pressing harder but (evidently) not consistently enough. "You have to press in and keep it pressed. While you err... swipe" I said, somewhat exasperated that something so simple should seem so difficult to a newcomer. She prodded a few more times and, after a minute or so, had got the hang of it.
But - I had to ask myself, would we have had to go through this rigmarole if I'd handed her the Nokia X6? Or N8? Or Samsung i8910? All with capacitive screens? Having started fairly ambivalent towards touchscreen technology, I've switched my allegiance in 2010 by pointing out that touch is more than about tapping on-screen buttons these days, it's more organic in terms of gestures and resistive screens have been left well and truly behind.
And so I returned home. Like most power users of Symbian smartphones, I'd tried and rejected the Nokia N97. Again. But I always come back off these trips with more information, more reasons, more insight. And the N97 did get me through the seven days away from desktop and broadband and 3G, without going rusty, without falling to bits on me, without running out of power once....
As many people have observed, what we need is something with the N97 form factor (i.e. folding qwerty/touch hybrid), but with a 3.7" or 4" capacitive, transflective LCD screen, 256MB of RAM, Symbian^3 on board, a 512MB internal system disk (C:), plus 8mp camera with 720p video capture.
'We'? OK, it's "what Steve wants", at least 8-)
Steve Litchfield, AAS, 31 Aug 2010