Nokia N97 Review

Camera:

Most top range devices feature 8-megapixel cameras these days. The Nokia N97 lags behind the pack here, coming with a 5-megapixel, equipped with Carl Zeiss Tessar optics and double LED flash. Its interface is virtually the same as on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which is, in turn, not that good. Interface itself is OK, although switching options on and off doesn’t feel comfy enough and they are plenty – you can choose between eight scene setting, variety of shooting modes, 4 color effects, white balance, exposure, ISO sensitivity, contrast, sharpness and multiple snapshot sequence. After taking a picture you can share it right away over the Ovi and Vox services, but others like Facebook, Picasa and Flickr are not available.

In terms of image quality, the Nokia N97 is a passable performer, no matter whether you want to see the pictures on your phone screen or in full size on your monitor. Warm colors in outdoor snapshots, taken even in bright lighting conditions, appear somewhat burnout. Still, images look realistic as a whole. Those taken indoors look great in full screen on the 3.5-inch phone display and not that amazing in real size, i.e. on a computer monitor, where you will eventually notice they lack enough details and are somewhat blurry. We are pretty disappointed with the snapshots uploaded on Facebook. Even lower and midrange cell phones deliver better results with this respect.

Nokia N97 sample video shot at 640x480 pixels resolution






Phone gallery feels comfy to use and allows several different filtering modes. Aside from being able to see them piled up, images can also be grouped by month or relevant album name, plus they are easily tagged. All told, we do like the gallery that is far better than the one on the Nokia 5800. It also opens and is operated much faster than its cousin on the Samsung OMNIA HD.





Multimedia:

N-series makes rarely perform badly with multimedia. Most of those that have come out before the N97 feature cool and comfortable Multimedia Shortcuts menu that seems to have vanished into this air on the N97, replaced with Music and Videos&TV menus. As the names suggest, the former allows access to your audio files, online music store, where you can purchase more and FM radio, while the latter shows available video files. Let’s gets started with the audio capabilities of the device.

Audio player comes with a boring interface. Naturally, it offers several options to filter content – by album, artist, composer etc and it is a good there are several equalizer presets and sound effects you can take your pick from. As a whole, it is really easy to use, but we would have liked to see something newer, more modern and appealing. Take a look at our review of the Samsung OMNIA HD i8910 to see the much better looking audio player the Korean manufacturer has equipped their device with.




Audio quality through the stereo speakers is high and volume is quite loud, which makes the device a good performer, although the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic fares better with this respect. The provided earphones are the same as the pair coming with the 5800 and provide good sound, although not nearly loud enough to drown out environmental noises. In its role of music phone, the N97 is slightly worse than the best devices available at the moment, like the Sony Ericsson W980 and this is the reason we are not entirely happy with it.

The Videos&TV menu allows you to take a pick from several options – see recently watched content, all available videos, the ones captured with the device camera only or those downloaded from the Internet. They are played with Real Player, which comes with the operating system. It is not that we don’t like it, but seeing it makes us again think of the Samsung OMNIA HD and its better video player that happens to support subtitles. You will have to make do with the standard one on the Nokia N97 though. Its interface is easy to use and offers several options, although is nothing to brag about as a whole.

Videos coded at the native resolution of the screen (640x360 pixels) and in MPEG4 part2 format are played well. Image quality is not exactly perfect, but watching content on the 3.5-inch screen doesn’t make for bad experience, not at all. There is TV out, but you won´t be able to play HD videos like on the Samsung OMNIA HD which still remains the best device in terms of supported video formats and its capability to allow users to watch videos without having to convert content to make it compatible.