I Want My N97!
Now that the N97 is now available for Pre-sale on the NokiaUSA site and I’ve placed my order along with an offer to receive a free Bluetooth headset, I’m one more step closer to getting my hands on this device. It has been a long road coming on this device and one that has been filled with enough speculation to make me jump ship and abandon hope for my N97. Every Nokia head has drawn their own conclusion on the fate of the upcoming release and I’ve had my own opinion as well. I’ve always maintained the point that the handset is plenty powerful and plenty capable.
Newly updated specs do not turn me away from the device. It seems that everyone is up in arms about the supposed power deficiency. Power alone does not make a handset; applications support, and adoptability by a carriers/consumers is what makes a handset. The beautiful (IMO) N96 was very powerful but yet not a commercial success. Every critic of the handset’s power offering is critically not aware of the versatility of the S60 OS’s historic advantage of driving value is devices with meager power with simplicity and of well packaged OS.
The N97 is refined and will set the standard once again for mobile devices much like the N95 did when it launch 3 years ago. To my friends at Espoo, please ensure smooth integration of Ovi, minimize distractions from bugs in the OS, and don’t forget developers and their apps.
I’m now left wondering how a mobile device with an ARM11 CPU with clock rate of 434 MHz considered slow.
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May 4th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
699$ is way out of my reach. good to know u have pre-booked one. do provide us with more coverage once you receive it.
May 4th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Ovi, Another classic fail on Nokia's part! And you seriously trust $700 on a 'pre-order' with Nokia? Did you already forget what a fucking disaster the Nokia E71 Camera was!? And they still refuse to 'fix' it for their customers? How about the fact that Nokia put in FP2 for AT&T but regarding your 'support' for developers, etc bullshit – do you EVER think Nokia will put FP2 for the rest who bought their phones for $450 unlocked? Seriously – you reviewers need to give Nokia some shit first before you suck up to their ass and 'give' your high expectations – that deep down you know will never be met. Face it, Nokia does not know how to provide service (software and hardware). Something that Apple and other companies shine at.
Nokia has announced closure dates for Mosh and Widsets through e-mails and news releases along with the eventual replacement of these services by the new Ovi Store.
However, the smarts at Nokia have not included anything about when the Ovi Store is actually going to launch. Everywhere I read, it says the store is set to launch in May – but what's the date mate!??
A quick search of the Nokia website only adds to the ineptitude: Ovi launch search on Nokia's website
In my opinion, the only thing going for Nokia is the fact that S60 has multi-tasking and some of their phones support US 3G (AT&T).
Nokia, you are really trying hard to piss me off:
Customers are screaming what they want to see in the phones – but the honchos are too busy squandering their riches from the past (Programs which work in Silos like Nokia contacts, Friendview, etc).
Specific rants:
1. Ditch the cheap plastic cases – seriously! They are obvious and cheesy – N85 is a big fail because of it.
2. Use capacitive touch – I don't care what the hell your engineers say. Spend one hour with the iPhone and you will see how effortless capacitive is versus resistive.
3. Promote a standardized look and feel for apps through your SDK. Maintain customer expectation/experience and quality across all apps – created by Nokia or by a third-party developer. Does it even occur to you that’s one primary reason the iphone is so popular?
4. E71 – the camera is a joke compared to N73, which is three years older. This is not the precedent you want to set. News to you – technology should move forward – not backwards. The iPhone with a 2MP camera without flash takes phenomenally better pictures in daylight – that even after 3 E71 firmware updates. Get it? Fire the e71 camera division. It’s even worse when Nokia does not even accept they screwed up. And you wonder why Nokia has no market share in the US (hint the 5800 launch fiasco).
5. Firmware updates across the board!? E61 – just 3 years old – is a business phone. The browser sucks. It crashes all the time or runs out of memory. It’s an older version. UPDATE it! I paid $450 for that. You can’t leave it in the dirt after two years of half-hearted support. Why are your firmware updates 6 months apart? It’s unacceptable. The market and internet is evolving too fast for you to sit on your butt; either reduce the number of devices per service line (that’s another story) if you can’t handle them or hire more/smarter people.
6. EMEA, NAM, etc f/w update versions. Based on the updates you shoot out every 3-6 months, your QA guys are probably smoking crack. Even obvious fails slip through them. I can understand that hardware may differ over region-specific phones but it doesn’t warrant 3 month gaps between the region specific updates. Learn from your competitors – because these things will eat you if you don't acknowledge (Hint: Zune jokes). The end of your domination is already here – accept it to maintain ground. The 5800 alone will not save you and based on your price-range to specs for N97, I won’t count on that device either (LED instead of Xenon for a $700 phone? Maybe your giving the wrong kind of porn to your product gurus – it's turning them into sludge).
7. Widgets. Do you remember; 2 years ago, at an announcement – you mentioned that there will be widgets, which will let users input their flight details and in turn the widget will alert them about flight arrival or departure delays, airport conditions, etc? The services to offer this information are already here – e.g. FlightStats.com. But I don’t see the widgets anywhere?! What happened? Good idea/selling point but sounds like someone fell asleep. This should have been one primary focus of multitasking capability in a phone.
8. E-series. Aah… the award-winning phone that no credible reviewer had the balls to take a pock shot at. Instead, pussy-arsed reviewers sounded like they were done a favor with a review handset when they justified the poor camera performance, ‘oh, it’s a business phone; its primary function is not to take pictures.’ If that’s the case, then why the hell has it packed a shitty e-mail client for 4 years; even on its newest iteration? Oh, and why does the phone not recognize calendar invites!? Even gmail has worked that shit out. Inexcusable! Do you guys even test your own devices in a non-Nokia-centric environment at all? I didn’t think so. BTW, Nokia email is a paid for app eventually, it is not a replacement for the inbuilt messaging client. A client and service are two different entities and should be maintained so if you want people to use your devices anywhere. For e.g. your browser doesn’t just work with your servers now, does it?
9. RAM. Why do your phones even today have minuscule amounts of RAM – usually just enough to get by – even though the prices have dropped exponentially?
10. Call log – how did you manage to screw this up even more? Call log used to work fine on the E61. But with the FP1 / E71, every incoming call is shown as a ‘cell phone icon’ even if the number is associated with a land line. Also, why are you not using different icons for work, home, cell phones? Is that rocket science? BTW, what’s QA been up to – at this point you might want to call a narcotics raid on them. Don’t get me wrong, you had it working right a few years back. I know you’re new to the concept so repeat after me: technology should move forward – not backwards – with time.
11. Call log 2 – Where does all the information related to the call log get hidden? Because when I used synble, I noticed that it was able to extract a hell of a lot more information from the call log than the phone's client. This is just sick. Winmo phones allow you to store THIRTY days worth of information. Not only that, I can go into a contact, and view my call history for that contact including durations for every call as long as it was all within the 30-day limit. Obviously synble has managed to pull a lot of it out from my E71. But shouldn't this have been part of your phone? So tell me, do you use any phones from your competitor at all? It might be wise to make a few purchases; right about now. Plus, if you want to learn from your competitor, you have to use it as your primary phone for 30 days and then go back to a Nokia and see what you can improve. This is the EASIEST way to improve/add features without investing into any 'smart' people for R&D and probably should have been your first step.
12. Call log 3 – You know how right after you’ve called a contact or received a call, you want to try to call that contact again but but maybe at another number from the contact profile? Well guess what – you have to go through the address book to look at the other numbers. Yes, you can’t open the contact profile or alternate calling numbers from the call log itself. WTF? Talk about basic UI workflow/routing design fail. At this point, I’m beginning to think you have someone on the design/QA team with a mild narcolepsy problem.
13. Contacts – Have you ever noticed how ‘easy’ it is to ‘delete’ a contact but hard to 'undo' edits/deletes? I would think by the 5th iteration of S60 you would have got that down to a pat. I can hit the ‘back’ key and get a prompt to hit delete a contact. Nice. But if it’s a mistake, then what? I’m outta luck until the next time I sync. Plus, if my phone is set to sync automatically, then I will lose the information from my PC as well, if it comes in range with my computer (I use Bluetooth and sutosync) or if I forget about restoring the information before I re-sync. Did it EVER fucking occur to you that if you want to make deletion easy you have to make recovery just as easy, huh? Didn't think so. I am now beginning to think, Nokia folks secretly don't use their own phones.
14. Contacts 2: While we’re at it. If you begin to edit a contact and mid-way you decide to ‘cancel’ or discard all changes made to the contact (you haven’t saved yet). There is no way to do that. Seriously. I am sure many of you have noticed that by now – on FP1 at least – which is not that old and has seen tens of updates. From Nokia’s perspective, they probably want to ‘save’ all information on-the-fly as a user is typing to prevent accidental loss; which is a good thing. But would it kill ya' to also add a function to ‘discard’ all changes and revert back to previously saved version of the contact on the phone. It’s not rocket science again. UAT (User Acceptance Testing – probably a new term to you Nokia guys) – That should have caught this. You might want to schedule a deep talk with the some department heads.
15. Standard bookmarks in the browser that can’t be deleted. You asked for the hacking of your firmware. Because those bookmarks are useless and have never offered anything REMOTELY useful. They should have been removed from the browser by the second iteration 4 years ago. Or you should have built a team to develop content that's not discontenting. Besides, what’s wrong with allowing people rearrange those bookmarks? Plus the morons had to go right ahead and build a SEPARATE bookmark item for each link instead of putting them all in one folder called ‘Nokia’s junk’? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Instead of glorifying what you've accomplished, how about spending some time over the failures? Because it looks like they are being carried over iteration after iteration.
I can go on forever, but I am gonna stop here – cause as usual – you are probably not listening. But for your sake I hope you do!
Times have changed; it’s not just about the hardware anymore – but more about the software. Also, if you can’t make your software to interact with non-nokia phones over the internet then you’re wasting your time (Nokia Friendview, etc). There are many platforms to compute – the internet has always been social and your time as a leader has already been squandered.
When consumers spend $400 every 16 months for the past 6 years and have little to show for it. This is what happens.
I am SICK of the whole Nokia band-of-reviewers sucking on NOKIA dick and ignoring the most basic failures for the nth iteration.
E.g. Everyone is 'praising' the Nokia Messaging/Email app (the fuckers at Nokia couldn't even decide for 6 months whether to call it 'email' or 'messaging' drives the point when each already means something specific) but no one is chastising Nokia for the abysmal in-built e-mail client as unacceptable for $300+ phones – which will be the only 'free' alternative in a few months.
In fact, Europeans are screwed even harder since they pay 20% more for each phone but are happy with lower expectations! The Nokia 5800 unlocked (US 3G) is going for $299 (224 Euro). How can a $300 phone perform worse than a mid-range phone from 3 years ago!? (N73)
I have the right to call out a poorly managed product line especially when they have such haughty claims but little to show for. Nokia stopped innovating a long long time ago. I am only hoping that someone at Nokia pulls their head out of their arse, grows some balls and reads through this entire post.
This vent was written in 10 minutes – so please excuse typos.
PS What's the ovi launch date?
May 4th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
N96 failed for the exact same reason why N97 is going to fail. It seems Nokia doesn't get it.
N96 failed because it had the underpowered 369mhz processor with no 3D hardware acceleration, nobody wanted to give up their N95s and N82s for a device whose only selling point is an inbuilt 16GB flash drive. Everything else is less than or equal to what's already available in the market. Most of the customers didn't get fooled and gave the device a cold shoulder.
Nokia should've atleast matched the market standards with the new devices but they decided not to. With updated specs, N97 just got 'N96ed' and Its completely Nokia's fault.
May 5th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Hello
Nice comment about power – I also agree that the main Symbian strength is connectivity, and the trilions of free and paid apps floating on the web. That said, 434 MHz processor IS slow in my book, simply because:
1) Some future Nokia handsets will ship with 600 MHz processor
2) As far as I can see, this is a single-chip solution with no graphics acceleration. In normal usage esp on my Nokia 5800, you dont miss the graphics or the dual processors. But it is apps like gaming and photo browsing where the strength of powerful processor setup shines (such as N95 and N82). Currently, almost no 3D games are available for my 5800 and full screen java games also do not have a consistent framerate. With that big, high-res screen you'd think that graphics acceleration is a necessity. After all, this is what made the crippled, underpowered, overhyped iphone into a successful portable gaming console.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:36 am
The N96 was worse than that. It might have done alright if it did have a 369mhz processor, but Nokia reverted back to an ARM9 264mhz processor.
Charles, I really hope for your sake that everyone complaining about the processor is wrong and your $699 will be well spent, but I think they're right. The N97 is much more likely to be a failship than a flagship.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Oh, and the CPU is considered slow when the rest of the devices coming to market at the same time all have faster ones that use less power and support 3D hardware acceleration.
May 5th, 2009 at 3:54 am
Wow Man! You really are a BIG optimist
“I’m now left wondering how a mobile device with an ARM11 CPU with clock rate of 434 MHz considered slow.”
If you had read the comments and articles that was going on in this site from the DAY Nokia had mentioned the specs, you would have got a clear picture WHY it was under powered, but I guess you didn't.
but would like to add some specific points for N97
I wont go about a long rant as dextroz
1) its a “Flagship” phone for god's sake!!, how can a flagship phone be underpowered than a newer phone which is coming out the same year?? . I mean the he recently announced 5630 Xpressmusic device has a 600 mhz processor !!
2) I already have compared to other flagships phones from Samsung and Sony which have HIGHER specs, but to think that Nokia can OVERPRICE it more than both of them is simply preposterous!!
3)Probably Nokia will release a newer 'N97 i” within 6-12 months (after finally understanding their mistakes I hope!!) and then the early birds like you will be sitting on the fence!.As the way things are now, the hardware of the device is OUTDATED even before it is released !!.
4) Why is there even an NGage client on this?? I mean try playing Bounce on the 5800, you will know what I mean
. With the WIDGETS running and NGage On , bcos of the meager 128 MB ram it has, I am afraid U might see the famous “Close some applications and try again!” message on the absolutely flawless,700 bucks worth flagship device!!
As I have stated multiple times, I don't have any problems in Nokia releasing this phone, but to release this as a “Flagship” , “most powerful, multi-sensory mobile computer in existence” which is worth 700 bucks is total FAIL!!.
They could have released this as a mid-range phone, for about 200 bucks less, and people would not have quipped so much!!.
Please wake up and smell the coffee NOKIA !
May 5th, 2009 at 5:06 am
As I mentioned, I stand alone on my view of the N97 and the slot it intends to fill. I guess when apple released the iPhone, a device that succeded regardless of the meager power band it boasted. In an article I wrote earlier in “Nokia N97 Identity in NAM”, I based the success of the N97 not on hardware but on Nokia's ability to adopt services that will unlock this device's true potential.
My only complaints at this points truly is the price point which can be addressed with adoption from carriers. I'm not a Nokia employee but simply a true fan for over 10 yrs and counting. I do believe the N97 will be a success and I'll be glad to share my opinion. Till then, I can only control my speculation till my pre-order is filled and I review it.
May 5th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Ovi, Another classic fail on Nokia's part! And you seriously trust $700 on a 'pre-order' with Nokia? Did you already forget what a fucking disaster the Nokia E71 Camera was!? And they still refuse to 'fix' it for their customers? How about the fact that Nokia put in FP2 for AT&T but regarding your 'support' for developers, etc bullshit – do you EVER think Nokia will put FP2 for the rest who bought their phones for $450 unlocked? Seriously – you reviewers need to give Nokia some shit first before you suck up to their ass and 'give' your high expectations – that deep down you know will never be met. Face it, Nokia does not know how to provide service (software and hardware). Something that Apple and other companies shine at.
Nokia has announced closure dates for Mosh and Widsets through e-mails and news releases along with the eventual replacement of these services by the new Ovi Store.
However, the smarts at Nokia have not included anything about when the Ovi Store is actually going to launch. Everywhere I read, it says the store is set to launch in May – but what's the date mate!??
A quick search of the Nokia website only adds to the ineptitude: Ovi launch search on Nokia's website
In my opinion, the only thing going for Nokia is the fact that S60 has multi-tasking and some of their phones support US 3G (AT&T).
Nokia, you are really trying hard to piss me off:
Customers are screaming what they want to see in the phones – but the honchos are too busy squandering their riches from the past (Programs which work in Silos like Nokia contacts, Friendview, etc).
Specific rants:
1. Ditch the cheap plastic cases – seriously! They are obvious and cheesy – N85 is a big fail because of it.
2. Use capacitive touch – I don't care what the hell your engineers say. Spend one hour with the iPhone and you will see how effortless capacitive is versus resistive.
3. Promote a standardized look and feel for apps through your SDK. Maintain customer expectation/experience and quality across all apps – created by Nokia or by a third-party developer. Does it even occur to you that’s one primary reason the iphone is so popular?
4. E71 – the camera is a joke compared to N73, which is three years older. This is not the precedent you want to set. News to you – technology should move forward – not backwards. The iPhone with a 2MP camera without flash takes phenomenally better pictures in daylight – that even after 3 E71 firmware updates. Get it? Fire the e71 camera division. It’s even worse when Nokia does not even accept they screwed up. And you wonder why Nokia has no market share in the US (hint the 5800 launch fiasco).
5. Firmware updates across the board!? E61 – just 3 years old – is a business phone. The browser sucks. It crashes all the time or runs out of memory. It’s an older version. UPDATE it! I paid $450 for that. You can’t leave it in the dirt after two years of half-hearted support. Why are your firmware updates 6 months apart? It’s unacceptable. The market and internet is evolving too fast for you to sit on your butt; either reduce the number of devices per service line (that’s another story) if you can’t handle them or hire more/smarter people.
6. EMEA, NAM, etc f/w update versions. Based on the updates you shoot out every 3-6 months, your QA guys are probably smoking crack. Even obvious fails slip through them. I can understand that hardware may differ over region-specific phones but it doesn’t warrant 3 month gaps between the region specific updates. Learn from your competitors – because these things will eat you if you don't acknowledge (Hint: Zune jokes). The end of your domination is already here – accept it to maintain ground. The 5800 alone will not save you and based on your price-range to specs for N97, I won’t count on that device either (LED instead of Xenon for a $700 phone? Maybe your giving the wrong kind of porn to your product gurus – it's turning them into sludge).
7. Widgets. Do you remember; 2 years ago, at an announcement – you mentioned that there will be widgets, which will let users input their flight details and in turn the widget will alert them about flight arrival or departure delays, airport conditions, etc? The services to offer this information are already here – e.g. FlightStats.com. But I don’t see the widgets anywhere?! What happened? Good idea/selling point but sounds like someone fell asleep. This should have been one primary focus of multitasking capability in a phone.
8. E-series. Aah… the award-winning phone that no credible reviewer had the balls to take a pock shot at. Instead, pussy-arsed reviewers sounded like they were done a favor with a review handset when they justified the poor camera performance, ‘oh, it’s a business phone; its primary function is not to take pictures.’ If that’s the case, then why the hell has it packed a shitty e-mail client for 4 years; even on its newest iteration? Oh, and why does the phone not recognize calendar invites!? Even gmail has worked that shit out. Inexcusable! Do you guys even test your own devices in a non-Nokia-centric environment at all? I didn’t think so. BTW, Nokia email is a paid for app eventually, it is not a replacement for the inbuilt messaging client. A client and service are two different entities and should be maintained so if you want people to use your devices anywhere. For e.g. your browser doesn’t just work with your servers now, does it?
9. RAM. Why do your phones even today have minuscule amounts of RAM – usually just enough to get by – even though the prices have dropped exponentially?
10. Call log – how did you manage to screw this up even more? Call log used to work fine on the E61. But with the FP1 / E71, every incoming call is shown as a ‘cell phone icon’ even if the number is associated with a land line. Also, why are you not using different icons for work, home, cell phones? Is that rocket science? BTW, what’s QA been up to – at this point you might want to call a narcotics raid on them. Don’t get me wrong, you had it working right a few years back. I know you’re new to the concept so repeat after me: technology should move forward – not backwards – with time.
11. Call log 2 – Where does all the information related to the call log get hidden? Because when I used synble, I noticed that it was able to extract a hell of a lot more information from the call log than the phone's client. This is just sick. Winmo phones allow you to store THIRTY days worth of information. Not only that, I can go into a contact, and view my call history for that contact including durations for every call as long as it was all within the 30-day limit. Obviously synble has managed to pull a lot of it out from my E71. But shouldn't this have been part of your phone? So tell me, do you use any phones from your competitor at all? It might be wise to make a few purchases; right about now. Plus, if you want to learn from your competitor, you have to use it as your primary phone for 30 days and then go back to a Nokia and see what you can improve. This is the EASIEST way to improve/add features without investing into any 'smart' people for R&D and probably should have been your first step.
12. Call log 3 – You know how right after you’ve called a contact or received a call, you want to try to call that contact again but but maybe at another number from the contact profile? Well guess what – you have to go through the address book to look at the other numbers. Yes, you can’t open the contact profile or alternate calling numbers from the call log itself. WTF? Talk about basic UI workflow/routing design fail. At this point, I’m beginning to think you have someone on the design/QA team with a mild narcolepsy problem.
13. Contacts – Have you ever noticed how ‘easy’ it is to ‘delete’ a contact but hard to 'undo' edits/deletes? I would think by the 5th iteration of S60 you would have got that down to a pat. I can hit the ‘back’ key and get a prompt to hit delete a contact. Nice. But if it’s a mistake, then what? I’m outta luck until the next time I sync. Plus, if my phone is set to sync automatically, then I will lose the information from my PC as well, if it comes in range with my computer (I use Bluetooth and sutosync) or if I forget about restoring the information before I re-sync. Did it EVER fucking occur to you that if you want to make deletion easy you have to make recovery just as easy, huh? Didn't think so. I am now beginning to think, Nokia folks secretly don't use their own phones.
14. Contacts 2: While we’re at it. If you begin to edit a contact and mid-way you decide to ‘cancel’ or discard all changes made to the contact (you haven’t saved yet). There is no way to do that. Seriously. I am sure many of you have noticed that by now – on FP1 at least – which is not that old and has seen tens of updates. From Nokia’s perspective, they probably want to ‘save’ all information on-the-fly as a user is typing to prevent accidental loss; which is a good thing. But would it kill ya' to also add a function to ‘discard’ all changes and revert back to previously saved version of the contact on the phone. It’s not rocket science again. UAT (User Acceptance Testing – probably a new term to you Nokia guys) – That should have caught this. You might want to schedule a deep talk with the some department heads.
15. Standard bookmarks in the browser that can’t be deleted. You asked for the hacking of your firmware. Because those bookmarks are useless and have never offered anything REMOTELY useful. They should have been removed from the browser by the second iteration 4 years ago. Or you should have built a team to develop content that's not discontenting. Besides, what’s wrong with allowing people rearrange those bookmarks? Plus the morons had to go right ahead and build a SEPARATE bookmark item for each link instead of putting them all in one folder called ‘Nokia’s junk’? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Instead of glorifying what you've accomplished, how about spending some time over the failures? Because it looks like they are being carried over iteration after iteration.
I can go on forever, but I am gonna stop here – cause as usual – you are probably not listening. But for your sake I hope you do!
Times have changed; it’s not just about the hardware anymore – but more about the software. Also, if you can’t make your software to interact with non-nokia phones over the internet then you’re wasting your time (Nokia Friendview, etc). There are many platforms to compute – the internet has always been social and your time as a leader has already been squandered.
When consumers spend $400 every 16 months for the past 6 years and have little to show for it. This is what happens.
I am SICK of the whole Nokia band-of-reviewers sucking on NOKIA dick and ignoring the most basic failures for the nth iteration.
E.g. Everyone is 'praising' the Nokia Messaging/Email app (the fuckers at Nokia couldn't even decide for 6 months whether to call it 'email' or 'messaging' drives the point when each already means something specific) but no one is chastising Nokia for the abysmal in-built e-mail client as unacceptable for $300+ phones – which will be the only 'free' alternative in a few months.
In fact, Europeans are screwed even harder since they pay 20% more for each phone but are happy with lower expectations! The Nokia 5800 unlocked (US 3G) is going for $299 (224 Euro). How can a $300 phone perform worse than a mid-range phone from 3 years ago!? (N73)
I have the right to call out a poorly managed product line especially when they have such haughty claims but little to show for. Nokia stopped innovating a long long time ago. I am only hoping that someone at Nokia pulls their head out of their arse, grows some balls and reads through this entire post.
This vent was written in 10 minutes – so please excuse typos.
PS What's the ovi launch date?
May 5th, 2009 at 9:25 am
N96 failed for the exact same reason why N97 is going to fail. It seems Nokia doesn't get it.
N96 failed because it had the underpowered 369mhz processor with no 3D hardware acceleration, nobody wanted to give up their N95s and N82s for a device whose only selling point is an inbuilt 16GB flash drive. Everything else is less than or equal to what's already available in the market. Most of the customers didn't get fooled and gave the device a cold shoulder.
Nokia should've atleast matched the market standards with the new devices but they decided not to. With updated specs, N97 just got 'N96ed' and Its completely Nokia's fault.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Hello
Nice comment about power – I also agree that the main Symbian strength is connectivity, and the trilions of free and paid apps floating on the web. That said, 434 MHz processor IS slow in my book, simply because:
1) Some future Nokia handsets will ship with 600 MHz processor
2) As far as I can see, this is a single-chip solution with no graphics acceleration. In normal usage esp on my Nokia 5800, you dont miss the graphics or the dual processors. But it is apps like gaming and photo browsing where the strength of powerful processor setup shines (such as N95 and N82). Currently, almost no 3D games are available for my 5800 and full screen java games also do not have a consistent framerate. With that big, high-res screen you'd think that graphics acceleration is a necessity. After all, this is what made the crippled, underpowered, overhyped iphone into a successful portable gaming console.
May 5th, 2009 at 11:36 am
The N96 was worse than that. It might have done alright if it did have a 369mhz processor, but Nokia reverted back to an ARM9 264mhz processor.
Charles, I really hope for your sake that everyone complaining about the processor is wrong and your $699 will be well spent, but I think they're right. The N97 is much more likely to be a failship than a flagship.
May 5th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Oh, and the CPU is considered slow when the rest of the devices coming to market at the same time all have faster ones that use less power and support 3D hardware acceleration.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Wow Man! You really are a BIG optimist
“I’m now left wondering how a mobile device with an ARM11 CPU with clock rate of 434 MHz considered slow.”
If you had read the comments and articles that was going on in this site from the DAY Nokia had mentioned the specs, you would have got a clear picture WHY it was under powered, but I guess you didn't.
but would like to add some specific points for N97
I wont go about a long rant as dextroz
1) its a “Flagship” phone for god's sake!!, how can a flagship phone be underpowered than a newer phone which is coming out the same year?? . I mean the he recently announced 5630 Xpressmusic device has a 600 mhz processor !!
2) I already have compared to other flagships phones from Samsung and Sony which have HIGHER specs, but to think that Nokia can OVERPRICE it more than both of them is simply preposterous!!
3)Probably Nokia will release a newer 'N97 i” within 6-12 months (after finally understanding their mistakes I hope!!) and then the early birds like you will be sitting on the fence!.As the way things are now, the hardware of the device is OUTDATED even before it is released !!.
4) Why is there even an NGage client on this?? I mean try playing Bounce on the 5800, you will know what I mean
. With the WIDGETS running and NGage On , bcos of the meager 128 MB ram it has, I am afraid U might see the famous “Close some applications and try again!” message on the absolutely flawless,700 bucks worth flagship device!!
As I have stated multiple times, I don't have any problems in Nokia releasing this phone, but to release this as a “Flagship” , “most powerful, multi-sensory mobile computer in existence” which is worth 700 bucks is total FAIL!!.
They could have released this as a mid-range phone, for about 200 bucks less, and people would not have quipped so much!!.
Please wake up and smell the coffee NOKIA !
May 5th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
As I mentioned, I stand alone on my view of the N97 and the slot it intends to fill. I guess when apple released the iPhone, a device that succeded regardless of the meager power band it boasted. In an article I wrote earlier in “Nokia N97 Identity in NAM”, I based the success of the N97 not on hardware but on Nokia's ability to adopt services that will unlock this device's true potential.
My only complaints at this points truly is the price point which can be addressed with adoption from carriers. I'm not a Nokia employee but simply a true fan for over 10 yrs and counting. I do believe the N97 will be a success and I'll be glad to share my opinion. Till then, I can only control my speculation till my pre-order is filled and I review it.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:29 am
If any body wants to play games only with N97 then buy N97 and PS portable. Why a dump IPhone with no features as N97 have. Only the proccesser cannot make a phone HIT. Iphone may have better touch UI but its NOKIA they will boost the touch UI in their next software update. N97 will rock…..