Nokia N97 Blogger Preview

Went for the Nokia N97 Blogger Preview at Nokia Singapore office located at Alexandra Technopark. The Nokia N97 will be the next Nokia flagship device. It felt solid when I got my hands on it. There will be 2 colors for it. The black as well as the pearl white. There are a lot of interesting applications/widgets that you can place on the home screen such as Facebook, Stocks, Weather, etc. Gone are those days of those boring Active Standby screen which exists all the way till the N96. You can have up to 5 widgets on the home screen which you can arrange in any order you like. A neat feature which not many people may know is there if you swipe to the left or right of the home screen, all your widgets will be hidden to protect your privacy. Swipe again to get them back.

The sensitivity of the screen is just average due to the technology used. If I am not wrong, the N97 is using a resistive screen to cater for a wider audience with many different methods of input instead of a capacitive screen and hence scrolling or “flickering” is not as smooth as iPhone. That is the only complaint I have. In terms of responsiveness, I felt that it is more responsive than the iPhone. Typing on the mini QWERTY keyboard is quite smooth for me as the keys are not clustered together.

Of course the iPhone has a much thinner body but the length of both phones is above the same. The width of the N97 is much smaller than the iPhone.

There will be a few applications that is catered specially for the Singapore Market and it will be included in the default package at launch time. Applications include Straits Time, Golden Village (GV), SG Buses and a taxi application.

The N97 will be launching in June, should be before the mid of June 2009. The retail price is not yet know, but I estimate it to be about S$1200 or less without subsidy. In the mean time you can check out http://www.nokia.com.sg/n97, this will be the official Nokia N97 website in Singapore.

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