Straight from the Horse's Mouth!

This is what Axel Meyer, Head, Nokia's design team, has to say about the almost perfect mobile computer: the Nokia N97. He clearly mentions how quality was a big parameter, and how the focus was not on Nokia connecting people, which it does nevertheless, but was on People Connecting People. The sharing of applications made by people themselves, the sharing of multimedia, is of course brilliantly facilitated by Ovi as an interface and a platform. The focus also is on 'Your' phone, 'Your' web as he emphasizes. And the widgets are definitely going to go a long way in Nokia's futuristic outlook in the next few years!

Nothing unofficial about it!!

Now when we know all the features, It would be fun comparing what the speculations were about the N97 and what it is. It is clearly noticable that the final release model far exceeds the expectations :)

Nokia N97 in development?

Somewhere in 2006
A new, ultra-high-end model is set to occupy the summit of Nokia's cellphone lineup, according to Hungarian news site Terminal. The N97 is said to outclass its predecessors in the N-series by including a 20GB hard disk in its cellphone-sized frame, providing ample room for documents, music, and videos. Nokia will also perpetuate its emphasis on imaging by incorporating a 5-megapixel camera with 2.4X optical zoom for recording and a smaller, front-facing camera for video messages. A tall, 3-inch LCD at the heart of the N97 is likely to be the largest in its class. Dedicated media buttons and an FM radio complete the smartphone's known features. A release date and other launch information is unavailable; the phone is projected to reflect its high-end features in its price when it ships in the near future.

Final Press Release

Desktop. Laptop. Pocket: The era of the personal Internet dawns with the N97
December 02, 2008

Tilting touch display, QWERTY keyboard and personalized home screen - a true mobile computer

Barcelona, Spain - Nokia today unveiled the Nokia N97, the world's most advanced mobile computer, which will transform the way people connect to the Internet and to each other. Designed for the needs of Internet-savvy consumers, the Nokia N97 combines a large 3.5" touch display with a full QWERTY keyboard, providing an 'always open' window to favorite social networking sites and Internet destinations. Nokia's flagship Nseries device introduces leading technology - including multiple sensors, memory, processing power and connection speeds - for people to create a personal Internet and share their 'social location.'

Sensing your 'So-Lo'

The Nokia N97 introduces the concept of 'social location'. With integrated A-GPS sensors and an electronic compass, the Nokia N97 mobile computer intuitively understands where it is. The Nokia N97 makes it easy to update social networks automatically with real-time information, giving approved friends the ability to update their 'status' and share their 'social location' as well as related pictures or videos.

Widescreen - Internet and entertainment

The home screen of the Nokia N97 mobile computer features the people, content and media that matter the most. Friends, social networks and news are available by simply touching the home screen. The 16:9 widescreen display can be fully personalized with frequently updated widgets of favorite web services and social networking sites. The Nokia N97 is also perfectly suited for browsing the web, streaming Flash videos or playing games. Both the physical QWERTY and virtual touch input ensure efficiency in blogging, chatting, posting, sending texts or emailing.

The Nokia N97 supports up to 48 GB of storage, including 32 GB of on-board memory, expandable with a 16 GB microSD card for music, media and more. This is complemented by excellent music capabilities, full support for the Nokia Music Store and continuous playback time of up to 1.5 days. The Nokia N97 also has a 5-Megapixel camera with high-quality Carl Zeiss optics, 16:9 and DVD quality video capture, and support for services like Share on Ovi for immediate sharing over HSDPA and WLAN.

Experts Speak...!!

This one was posted by one of our regular visitors in one of the comments, and giving all due credit to Nikhil, here goes what the Experts have to say about this nemesis of the perfect phone: the N97!

Information Week
"It's the most exciting product to come from Nokia in some time. Product managers were calling it the 'Facebook Phone' because it's aimed at mobile social networkers and multimedia mavens. If you want a device that does nearly everything, this is it."

Cnet
"We really like its design -- the screen is large and sharp, and it rotates depending on which way you hold it up. But the N79's keypad left us a little less impressed as it's too flat for our liking and squashed together, making texting fiddly at times."


PC World
"Storage-wise, the N97 does very well. The phone comes with 32GB of on-board memory - that is twice the amount of memory the most expensive iPhone brings. As an extra, the capacity can be extended with microSD cards of up to 16GB, ranking up to a potential 48GB of storage on the N97."

ZDNet
"Nokia's N97 has some sweet specs – it supports up to 48GB of storage, has a 5-megapixel camera, music support and DVD quality video capture. The rub: The N97 isn't what you'd call affordable. It has an estimated retail price of EURO550 before taxes and subsidies...The N97 may be the coolest gadget on the planet, but there's no way I'm paying that much for it. Overall, the N97 may be the future netbook or laptop/smartphone hybrid, but it sure isn't priced like one."


InfoSync
"The Nokia N97 seems to have a lot of promise, but that's all it is right now. Nokia seems focused on the phone's location-based services, which is a wise move, but seems to be ignoring the larger picture. Nokia Maps does offer some welcome functionality improvements, but nothing we haven't seen before in other mobile navigation software".

The Register
"What I found most impressive is that users simply looking for a no-nonsense, practical tool will find the N97 is worth a second look...There's a drawback -- [the widgets are] cluttered and each widget doesn't really present very much useful information. It's the CNN approach to information overload - just overload the user with even more."

What say?

Whats your Widget..!!

At a glance what you will notice on the N97’s huge screen is something new to S60,the feeling is more like when you’ve shifted from XP to Vista,you will see Onscreen widgets.Now unlike the old (almost same on each and every s60 3rd Edition device)home(Standby) screen,the new screen is customizable on the N97,you can decide what to see and what to avoid,the new OS will allow the user to customise the home screen widgets as you wish with easy interactive touch movements.

What is a Widget?

A widget is a time-saving element of the device’s user interface, a visual building block that provides an easily accessible single interaction point with an application, which holds and processes data. There are thousands of types of widget.

The team behind the Nokia N97 have launched a competition to find the most creative, innovative and useful widget to stick on the new device’s home screen. The winner will receive a production-mode N97 ahead of public release. The widget will also be fully produced so you can spot your handiwork on N97s world wide! Luring enough?

How to Participate?

Download the design package, design your widget and upload it for others to rate. Keep visiting the site to log your opinions on others' offerings as the ten highest-rated designs will go in front of a panel of judges selected from the Nokia N-series team. The panel will choose the best home screen widget based on creativity, usability and quality of design. And programming skills are not required, even a novice like me can do it!

Prize: The winning designer will receive a Nokia N97 pre-loaded with a working version of the winning widget
Deadline: The closing date for the competition is February 27, 2009. The winner will be announced on this site on March 13, 2009.

Here are some real nice ones submitted by amateurs like you and me, and you can find more at the competition website. Inspiring enough?

Submit yours for a chance to win the Nokia N97 and good luck! Of course, I am making mine right now!

Eye Candy...!!

As demanded by you guys, these are some sample pictures which have been taken from an N95 which also has a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens. The actual size of these pictures is far far bigger than what blogspot can accomodate on the page, thus for your convenience, I have given links on every picture to click and lead you to the actual size.

Pure treat for the eyes, isn't it?

Search Google for more and more images, or lazy souls like me can click here to directly visit this website with many luring pictures clicked by an N95! Can it get better? Yes it just did!

Picture Perfect...!!

Talk about the 416×352 resolution of the N80 and N90, and for such a long time, successive flag ship phones had to endure with 320 x 240. Nokia have understood the importance of fitting a High-end cam into their flagship device while many other touch device competitors forgot to do so.Also this is a perfectly timed decision taken to keep the existing Nokia multimedia fans sticked to the N-series in the future too.

The N97 has 640×360! Not Nokia’s highest, the internet tablets have that point; but it’s a small leap in the right direction. It’s higher than the iPhone’s 480×240 but MORE IMPORTANTLY, the aspect ratio is TRUE 16:9 widescreen. This is absolutely fantastic because which means you have a more effective use of the 3.5 inch display when viewing widescreen videos, i.e. No/less BLACK BARS. The move to true widescreen is also important considering YouTube’s evolution to 16:9 true widescreen, so newer YouTube videos can be seen in their full non-letter-glory that you would get when viewing on a standard 4:3 screen.


Combined with the sizable collection of videos the N97 can carry, (if a 90minute DivX video takes around 700mb, that’s at least 22 movies stored on a 16GB memory card alone! 68 films if you want to fill up the entire memory!)makes the N97 quite practical portable video player . Fingers crossed the N97 meets the 4.5 hours of video playback. This possibly means 270 minutes giving you enough time to finish any single part of the Lord of the Rings and still have juice left for other applications.

Higher pixels means also means richer visual experience for viewing photos and browsing the internet. You’ll see more of your photos not just physically, but more detail, and this is especially useful when browsing the internet as you can read the small font text without necessarily having to zoom in as required on lower resolution devices.

I’m sure it will be a great pleasure to do the Photo/Videography on a 3.5 inch widescreen camera view,I just can’t wait to have that experience.Also the camera controls will be more maneuverable with the touch controls than using the navigational D-pad to scroll along the menus.T camera would produce more realistic and Lively images with the help of Carl Zeiss lens and picture color renditions.

Okay mobile movie lovers,its time to setup your budgets for mid 2009.

Are you game?...

N-gage needs no introduction to any of us. All of us, in our boring lectures when half of the class is asleep, while going to office in the car, sitting idle waiting for someone, workless, have had our Nokia phones and gamed away to winning glory! Nokia N97 is the next big N-Gage device. One gets nothing less than astonished when discovers the possibility of widescreen gaming, touchscreen games, accelerometer support and the possibilities that the N97 brings for N-Gage games.

The Future of N-gage :
With the N97 changing things for N-gage through the introduction of new kinds of games and technologies, next year promises to be pretty exciting. Context is king in that location is going to play a much bigger part in gaming in the future. Music too will have tighter integration and Nokia is already in the process of developing new music based initiatives.

N-gage on the Nokia N97 :
In the next video, we can hear Jaako Kaidesoja, vice president of N-gage, to find out what we might expect when it launches . As he says, it is the first device which gives you the full scale and capabilities to run the most amazing of the games. Widescreen games is the first thing, with current and future games getting the full widescreen treatment. Touch, and tilt based gaming is also on the cards. All sounds pretty exciting.

The future of N-Gage sounds good, but will it be enough to compete with the variety of new iPhone games being released.

I think YES.

What do you think ?