The Nokia N97 was announced in Nov 08 as a flagship device of the Nokia N-series, as all the other N series devices it shares the same philosophy, a consumer-oriented smartphone with sophisticated capabilities of media handling and orientation toward social-networking.

The device was announced in great fanfare by Nokia, few videos were released by Nokia at the time showing CGIs of what the device will look like, and how the OS will behave, under the spotlight was the new Widget framework on the Home Screen, a functionality new to Symbian OS.

But in effect, just looking at those CGIs videos one would quickly realize that the device was still carrying the legacy Symbian user interface, with just touch added on top.

Many months have gone since them, and with them the "usual" promises from Nokia that the device will be revolutionary, iPhone killer, that many featurs will be added, etc. etc.

With this in mind Nokia also initiated a campaign trough the use of Twitter, bloggers workshops etc. with the target of building up hype and a fan base.

Eventually the device has started to make his way to the retail channels in June this year (2009) and I have had the chance to put my hands on it and use it for an extended period of time, just to be clear, my previous mobile phone was a Nokia N95 8GB edition, an awesome device for the time it came out, a bit of a swiss-knife of a mobile phone.

I have to say that I am not very impressed by this device, the choice of a resistive touch screen has meant it doesn't support multitouch and is best operated with a stylus(which is supplied by Nokia) or by the tip of your fingernails, the screen in fact often fails to recognise the user's finger touch, at the point that I often ended up using the keyboard to move in/out of menues and apps.

The OS and base apps are basically the same as the N73-N95-5800 devices, and if you have used any of those devices you will feel at home, there is very little functionality added, since touch functionality are a layer on top of the OS and multitouch is not supported, Symbian had to come up with solutions like using large chunks of screen estate in order to show up/down buttons, zoom sliders etc...that, for how hard they try they still look like something stitched on top of the OS, especially when compared to the elegance and speed of the Android, Palm and iPhone operating systems.

the browser is half a joke, it does support flash lite, which means video streaming, which obviously you can only appreciate using wi-fi or a 3G connection. THe browser is not as smooth and doesn't have the same kind of page overview and quality of rendering of Android, Palm and the excellent Safari on iPhone.

Anyway trying not get too technical, as you will find plenty of reviews around the net,
I would say that I don't consider the N97 as an upgrade from my N95, to me is just an N95 with a different shell and touch, which doesn't justify the hefty price of the device and the hype.

I wish NOKIA had done things differently and moved away from the legacy Symbian OS.
The OVI shop is a joke, the few applications on the market lack in quality, UI consistency and continuity of updates.

NOKIA fails to understand that nowadays is the experience on the OS that counts and not the number of features on a spec sheet.

If you are a N-series E-series NOKIA owner don't bother with this device as is not really an upgrade for you, if you don't own a NOKIA and were thinking about the N97 I say again don't bother, nowadays there is plenty of excellent devices on the market to choose from HTC Hero, HTC Magic, Blackberry, Palm Pré and iPhone. NOKIA needs to go back to teh drawing board and re-invent their philosophy and the OS that will deliver that message.