I’ve been looking at the new upcoming Nokia N97 for a while now, doing research, watching videos and what not. I’ve noticed I’m drooling more than I thought I would. My initial thought was that it just looked way too chunky, and I guess yes, it is pretty damn chubby. But couldn’t it be worth it?

It looks like it is a pretty fast device, which is one of my biggest concern when it comes to Smartphones/PPC’s. But the one thing I truly dread however, is that I think the buttons at the bottom, the Send/End buttons, are “touch buttons” or whatchamacallit. I had this on the E-Ten Glofiish M800 (PhoneArena review) and it was just horrific. You always touch them by mistake and either hang up on the caller or just switch screens on yourself. Not too exciting when driving using the GPS… And with a slow device as it was, it drove me nuts all over…

The N97 has got some nice specs as reported by CrunchGear and nokian97.org (which of course is down at this particular moment) amongst others, including an impressive amount of memory:

• OS: Symbian S60 (5th Edition)
• Size: 117.2mm x 55.3mm x 15.9mm
• Weight: ca 150g (ca 0.33lbs)
• Memory: Up to 48GB memory (32GB built-in + 16GB microSD)
• Display: 3.5 inch TFT up to 16M colors nHD 16:9 (640px × 360px)
• Talk time: Up to in min. 320 (3G) / 400 (GSM)
• Standby time: Up to in hrs 400 (3G) / hrs (GSM)
• Video playback: Up to 4.5 hrs (offline mode)
• Music playback: Up to 37 hrs (offline mode)
• Image capture: Up to 5 MP (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7M/24-bit color)
• Input: Slide-out QWERTY keyboard
• GPS: A-GPS with electronic compass

I never really got the whole 2G/3G specs. Well, of course I understand them, but in my opinion, who the heck switches 3G on and off? Or, who wants to switch it on and off? I’ve had 3G phones for many years now, and the “better” the technology gets, the worse off are we when it comes to battery life, and this becomes almost necessary if you want to have a phone turned on for one lousy day. C’mon people, give us some better batteries! Go nuclear batteries go! Wonder if that’d be possible…

No reports of the keyboard being less than good what I can find so far. I wish I could get my hands on it to test it myself. I’m a bit worried the upper row of keys could be too close to the screen, so you’d have trouble hitting them without interference. But the keys look large and to be spaced out enough.

If any phone should be referred to as a possible iPhone 3G killer, shouldn’t the Nokia N97 be it? And are you as tired as I am at that expression? iPhone killer…

A very nice hands-on video by Phone Scoop where both hardware and software is discussed and captured:

According to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.se, the new Nokia phone 5800 is a real iPhone killer. Let’s start by looking at the price. €279 with no plan, no commitments, no nothing. That sounds very good indeed. That price might take out the Apples Iphone, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and Htc Touch Diamond right on the spot.

Secondly, let’s look at the music side of it. It is indeed called Xpress Music. In countries where the Nokias Music Store is available, users can download directly to their mobile device, nice. But oooooh. The music is DRM protected. Not good, seems to me like Nokia is a bit after its time.

The camera has 3.2 MP which sounds good on paper. Internal memory of 8GB is a nice standard, and it’s extendable to 16GB. WiFi, Flash player, MMS, Copy/Paste. Also a built in GPS receiver, but I’m not sure what kind.

Another cool feature is that it comes preloaded with Qik, which is an application that allows you to stream live video from the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music device.

As you can see, some features like MMS and Copy/Paste is one step ahead of the iPhone, but… I’m not seeing the iPhone killing really happening here. Maybe that’s just me.

Via: Aftonbladet.se