Nokia N97 deals & review

Nokia’s stable of flagship N series smartphones gets another occupant in the Nokia N97, a full touchscreen monolithic smartphone measuring 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm on a rather heavy 150g body. It is one of the most powerful touchscreen smartphone on the market running on an ARM11 CPU clocked at 434 MHz with the Symbian OS 9.4, Series 60 release 5. 

High End Key Features

The N97 is a quad band GSM (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) radio to take care of international roaming common among its target market on 2G GSM. It also has class 32 GPRS/EDGE data speeds for up to 296 Kbps on the 2G network. It gets 3G network coverage from its tri band UMTS (900 / 1900 / 2100) with HSDPA data speed of up to 3.6 Mbps for a remarkably fast internet surfing experience. 

You also get hotspot surfing support from its WiFi 802.11b/g with UPnP technology. Local high speed data connectivity is supported by its Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired data transfers, respectively. SatNav support comes from an onboard GPS receiver with A-GPS and Nokia Maps.

Your multimedia experience on the road begins with stereo FM radio with RDS and Visual Radio as well as an FM transmitter. Then there are the usual media players for decoding audio content in the MP3, WMA. WAV and eAAC+ formats and video content in the WMV, RealVideo and MP4 codecs.

There’s a set of stereo speakerphones, TV-out jack and a 3.5 mm stereo audio output jack for wired hi-fi stereo headphones or you can use wireless stereo earphones using its A2DP Bluetooth support. In the imaging area, you get an upscale 5 megapixel autofocusing shooter with LED flash and Carl Zeiss optics. 

Video clips get VGA resolution at 30fps frame rate. You also get a secondary 3G video camera up front which can also do VGA video clips but at 15fps.

All images and videos get displayed on its expansive 3.5-inch TFT LCD resistive touchscreen with Half-VGA resolution and 16 million color depth. It has a gravity accelerometer for auto rotate portrait or landscape viewing as well as a proximity sensor for auto turn-off of its touchscreen sensitivity when in a call.

Its most remarkable feature comes form a 32 GB onboard memory that can still grow another 16GB from its microSD slot. It has a 128 MB RAM for its system files as well as a phonebook with nearly unlimited contact entries. Its 1500 mAh Li-Ion BP-4L battery when fully charged yields a generous 9.5 hours of talk time on 2G and 432 hours on standby. You can also have up to 40 hours of continuous music listening on a single charge.

The N97 gets preloaded with a document reader for MS Office and Adobe PDF files and  installed with N-Gage games downloadable form the Nokia Store. You also get the usual WAP 2.0 HTML browser with RSS feed facility and Flash Lite 3 support, video and photo editors as well as its usual set of messaging apps like IM, Push Email and Email client support.