After several weeks of use I've become very used to having a very powerful smartphone in my hands, particularly one that is so stylish (it definitely turns heads) and sports a nice large screen, touch UI (love it) and a very comfortable slide-out QWERTY keyboard with tilt.

The N97 has most of the features that I could ever want in a converged device including: great sound for playing music and videos, high quality video capture and excellent digital camera (5 megapixel) although night/flash photography is still far from perfected! The UI offers a pretty pleasant experience and several of the bundled features had me hooked from the get go, these include: the free Ovi mail service (very useful while I travelled and simple to configure), Nokia maps, facebook mobile, and Ovi download (handy but still far from a addictive. Some of the must-have applications that I downloaded and would easily suggest to any S60 5th edition device user include: Gravity Twitter client; JoikuSpot; Accuweather; Google maps mobile with Latitude;Qik for live video streaming etc...

Overall the experience was amazing and I must admit I'm having a very tough time going back to the N95 8GB due to its lack of QWERTY. The N97 when loaded with the apps that I previously mentioned was a true social media workhorse, enabling me to easily,comfortably, and quickly Tweet all day long, share photos via Ovi share, flickr, facebook, twitpic and stream videos to Qik and my YouTube.

On the down-side, even though the N97 seems to come with loads of memory, I did start running out of available memory quite fast, after loading just several apps, and on the very disappointing side, after a couple of weeks use I did start experiencing some application failures which included spontaneous restarts, problems with the GPS, and a mild disaster that seemed to result in all my email and text messages being wiped clean from memory... that was quite disappointing. In Nokia's defense there is a firmware update available for the N97 which I did not run, however, I typically equate updating my S60 firmware with being about as much fun as going to the dentist so you can't really blame me can you?

So, would I buy the N97?? Well, I definitely want one, there's no question about that, however, given that here in the USA there are currently no operators that subsidize the device so the only option is to purchase an unlocked device for the suggested retail price which runs about $700... sorry but that's simply not in my budget at this time! Given the technical issues that I ran into I would have to say that had I purchased the device and had these problems I would have been very disappointed, likewise, being told I "need" a firmware update just 2 weeks after buying this device would have bothered me as well. The N97 could be a winner, however, I suspect that won't happen until there's some improvements to the OS... perhaps the "N97-2" will be the one! For now I'm searching for the next great social-mobile device to test... any suggestions?  

In a nutshell, some of the best features of the N97:

• the camera
• Ovi mail
• excellent music player
• enjoyable touch UI + QWERTY
• Nice to see it ship with Qik
  

The not so good

• buggy firmware
• huge price and no carrier subsidy (USA)
• memory issues

Some wishes:

• a trackball would be a cool addition
• more supported applications and a more useful marketplace
• ship with Sports Tracker (amazing app) and a screen capture utility
• should also ship with Shozu and Gravity for Twitter
• T-Mobile USA to actually carry some decent Nokia S60 devices!

• JoikuSpot
• World Traveller (Psiloc)
• Accuweather
• YouTube mobile
• AP news
• bing search
• facebook mobile (although buggy)
• Qik video streaming (awesome)
• Trapster
• Twibble for Twitter
• Gravity for Twitter - rocks!
• TweetS60 - basic but free!
• Google maps mobile + LAtitude
• ScreenSnap freeware
  

For more on the Nokia N97 See:

Free Symbian Applications

S60.com

N97 from Nokia EU

Roland Tanglao's Blog