The Nokia N97 is a nicely designed phone. The design is agreeable to look at, and the build quality is good, except maybe for the battery cover which has a plastic feel - but it needs to be flexible because it's *removable*. The display is a mixed bag: it has a resolution of 640x360 but the colors seem a little faded and the clarity seems inferior to other touch phones. I suspect that one of the display layers has something to do with this. Two people that I've shown the phone to immediately made the same remark as well.

Next to the speaker, you will notice a front-facing camera and a proximity sensor. The 5 Megapixel camera is in the back, protected by a sliding lens cover. There's a "camera" button that makes taking picture more natural than taping on the screen (which often induces a last minute shake that could makes photos blurry). The keyboard sliding mechanism feels solid.

The portrait/landscape switch works most of the time, but it sometimes won't switch from portrait to landscape and you will have to open the keyboard to force it to do so.

The display of the N97 provides a tactile feedback upon clicking. It's interesting, but it won't help with typing speed, if you wonder. It might be something that we want to disable to expand the battery life a bit.

Some functions like "Unlock" or "Menu" are accessible only by the hardware buttons, which is weird, considering that most people would expect everything to be accessible via the touch display. It's not a roadblock, but it's not completely intuitive.

Responsiveness (Average)

There's nothing as frustrating as a slow phone, right? The Nokia N97 is a mixed bag when it comes to responsiveness. Most of the time, it is responsive and does what I want, but if there are a few applications running it will get slow. I understand that it's better to have less apps opened, but it's "only" a few apps. Secondly, it's too much work to go and close them one by one, so I suspect that most people will do exactly what I did: nothing. All phones should have a "close all apps" icon on the homepage.

Homepage Widget (Well Implemented)

Widgets are popular these days. Samsung and Sony Ericsson (Xperia) are big believers of Widgets, but the N97 has the best homepage widgets implementation that I have seen so far. On many phones, widgets are messy (like the OMNIA), but Nokia has done a good job at maximizing the use of screen space. I like the default homepage that includes Facebook, but I noticed that the widget was often out of sync with the real-time content (this is true for Exchange as well). That should be fixed. It would also be nice if we could interact with the widgets directly from the homepage, like updating a Facebook status or a Tweet from the homepage.

Keyboard (Average)

Having a physical keyboard is just great for heavy texters. The N97 keyboard suffers from the same issue than all sliders have: the buttons are very thin, which reduces the typing speed - at least, for me. To be fair, this is one of the better slider keyboard that I have played with recently. Also, the keys are spaced just a little too far apart, making the finger travel much and that makes the typing slower too. The space key is oddly placed too. As an alternative, I would propose having an Sym, Shift and Func (to get the blue characters) on both side of the keyboard and place a recessed trackball, instead of using directional "joystick".

For those who text in the dark, the keyboard has a beautiful backlighting and the two-tone (white and blue) characters make it very readable. Other phone makers should definitely take notice.

Text/Email (Good)

The N97 has a lot of email options and the one that I prefer for work is Exchange: it is well implemented and works flawlessly. Emails arrive instantly and the only thing that I noticed is that upon a soft reset (battery removal), the phone does not cache the Exchange email and spends time doing a "sync" from scratch (that can take a couple of minutes).

I also setup a GMail account. From the @gmail.com address, the N97 was able to preset all the mail server settings. All that I had to provide is my email and password. By default, that email was setup to use the 3.5G connection, so you might want to set it up with the "default" connection, to make it work over WIFI as well. All in all, the setup couldn't be much easier.

The N97 has a lot of email options and the one that I prefer for work is Exchange: it is well implemented and works flawlessly. Emails arrive instantly and the only thing that I noticed is that upon a soft reset (battery removal), the phone does not cache the Exchange email and spends time doing a "sync" from scratch (that can take a couple of minutes).

I also setup a G Mail account. From the @gmail.com address, the N97 was able to preset all the mail server settings. All that I had to provide is my email and password. By default, that email was setup to use the 3.5G connection, so you might want to set it up with the "default" connection, to make it work over WIFI as well. All in all, the setup couldn't be much easier.

Mapping (Great)

It won't come as a surprise that Nokia has a good 5 Megapixel camera. Of course, Megapixels don't mean much in terms of quality, but in my experience this is "good" to "very good". The flash works well too. In my tests, I found that the N97 had a photo quality superior to the Blackberry 8900 that we usually use to live blog. To see more photos, including full-size ones, head to our Flickr page.

I had some issues with the video recording: the auto-focus never worked (!). Nobody else seems to complain, and Nokia has not replied to my email on the subject. At the moment, I'll file this as a "problem with our unit", but drop a comment if you noticed this elsewhere.

Multimedia (Just OK)

With 32GB of internal memory and the possibility of adding 16GB more via a microSD card the storage is great. With Windows Media Player (iTunes is not supported), it is relatively easy to sync files with the N97 (who uses WMP to manage media files?). Make sure that you connect with the "Media Transfer" option and the N97 will appear in Windows Media Player. From there you can drag and drop things that you want to sync. It takes seconds to sync a dozen .mp3 files. WMA files with DRM won't work (Rhapsody...). As you can guess, the sound quality was definitely OK and will be limited by your earplugs, unless you are walking around with expensive audio gears.

You can play music while reading your emails if you want. If a call occurs during the playback, the music will stop and will restart where it stopped.

The video playback demos included in the phone were working fine and looked like they were running at 30 frames per second. The image quality is just OK - not great like it was on the HTC Touch Pro. After playing with the Samsung OMNIA HD, it's hard to be impressed. The N97 video playback is good enough to enjoy a TV show. On the video side, the big question is where the content will come from. Users rarely take the time to convert their desktop videos to a mobile format, even if there are good options out there to do it. The store content was very interesting to me, but you might find something there...

Another thing of interest is the Radio. it works really well and tunes itself to available local stations. The sound was very clear on the few stations that were found immediately. Cool stuff.

Battery Life (Average)

During the test, I found the that average battery life was about 1.5 to 2 days with my usage (see "context" up there). Obviously, this will vary a lot depending on your own usage, but the bottom line is that most people would charge it daily, but if you forget it, you won't have a dead phone in the morning.