Nokia N97 - AKA The iPhone Killer!

Posted:
in iPhone edited January 2014
Well, my iPhone will be taking a hike when nokia's iPhone killer hit's the shelves next year.



5mp camera with advanced video recording capabilities and flash.

Revamped messaging system that still includes popular formats like SMS & MMS.

Fast file transfers by bluetooth.

Quick copy & paste method.



And thats not even naming it's main features!



Check it out here:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/...th_QWERTY_.php



So who else will be ditching their inferior iPhones for this beauty?
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by pearshaped View Post


    Well, my iPhone will be taking a hike when nokia's iPhone killer hit's the shelves next year.



    5mp camera with advanced video recording capabilities and flash.

    Revamped messaging system that still includes popular formats like SMS & MMS.

    Fast file transfers by bluetooth.

    Quick copy & paste method.



    And thats not even naming it's main features!



    Check it out here:

    http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/...th_QWERTY_.php



    So who else will be ditching their inferior iPhones for this beauty?



    Count me in. Well, not completely. I will still have my iPhone for the few things that the Nokia can't do. If Nokia were to sign a movie deal, it would be game over I think.
  • Reply 2 of 49
    carniphagecarniphage Posts: 1,984member
    On the negative side....

    The N97 looks bulky and I am skeptical whether Nokia will get a slick touch-based interface running on top of Symbian. The videos of the device in use don't look very promising. Nokia are not using a capacitive screen which I think is a big mistake. People now expect touch screens to be like the iPhone.



    On the positive side..

    There's a boat-load of features in there.

    I particularly like the status screen which includes weather, emails and social widgets.



    It looks like there is going to be some vigorous competition in this space. Which is a good thing for everyone, including iPhone users.



    C.
  • Reply 3 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Carniphage View Post


    On the negative side....

    The N97 looks bulky and I am skeptical whether Nokia will get a slick touch-based interface running on top of Symbian. The videos of the device in use don't look very promising. Nokia are not using a capacitive screen which I think is a big mistake. People now expect touch screens to be like the iPhone.



    On the positive side..

    There's a boat-load of features in there.

    I particularly like the status screen which includes weather, emails and social widgets.



    It looks like there is going to be some vigorous competition in this space. Which is a good thing for everyone, including iPhone users.



    C.



    Wow. A fair and balanced post on this sight. Great take. I think this will be an interesting coming year for devices as such. Hopefully it is a win, win for consumers.
  • Reply 4 of 49
    backtomacbacktomac Posts: 4,579member
    Why don't you wait for it to make it to market before ditchin' your iPhone (if you even have one)?



    The symbian phones I've seen have all sucked from a software perspective. Maybe Nokia is improving symbian, but I'd like to see a version of symbian that doesn't suck before I'll even consider it.



    The BB Storm was supposed to be an iPhone killer too and it look at it.



    I've owned a lot of cellphones and the iPhone is the best by far. It isn't perfect but I've more faith that Apple will get closer to perfect than any of the other handset makers.
  • Reply 5 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by backtomac View Post


    Why don't you wait for it to make it to market before ditchin' your iPhone (if you even have one)?



    The symbian phones I've seen have all sucked from a software perspective. Maybe Nokia is improving symbian, but I'd like to see a version of symbian that doesn't suck before I'll even consider it.



    The BB Storm was supposed to be an iPhone killer too and it look at it.



    I've owned a lot of cellphones and the iPhone is the best by far. It isn't perfect but I've more faith that Apple will get closer to perfect than any of the other handset makers.



    1. I do not have to prove to you what I do and do not own. If I say I have one, then for me that is good enough. If not for you, then so be it. So that is one point we cleared up.



    2. The moment I can store docs on the iPhone natively I will consider it a smartphone rather than an iPod with phone. The fact that you mention BB as your mobile phone prospective, I would suggest you get out more. The BB phone system are quite capable and more smartphone than the iPhone. You might want to look to Europe or Japan to get an idea of what real smart phones are.

    3. The current version of Symbian on the N97 is miles ahead of the iPhone. Yes, yes, yes, yes, you have the touch screen of the iPhone but it is still wrapped around 2 year old (yup Apple caught up here) technology. If this forward leaning for you then so be it, but for some cutting edge is more than a fancy screen.
  • Reply 6 of 49
    I think it has a lot to do with what you want and are used to. If you are used to a 1970 Polo then a 2008 Golf GTI is fantastic.



    To me the iPhone is an iPod trying to be a smartphone. It is great for someone who likes to play music and maybe use some smartphone features. The N97 on the otherhand is a smartphone thru and thru. To compare the two would be like comparing a stereo system to a laptop.
  • Reply 7 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Nokmate View Post


    I think it has a lot to do with what you want and are used to. If you are used to a 1970 Polo then a 2008 Golf GTI is fantastic.



    To me the iPhone is an iPod trying to be a smartphone. It is great for someone who likes to play music and maybe use some smartphone features. The N97 on the otherhand is a smartphone thru and thru. To compare the two would be like comparing a stereo system to a laptop.



    You are a wise man (or woman). Best description to date, but the people in this forum swear by He who is Jobs, and his minion Walt "lives in Apples underware" Mossberg about what the iPhone is and independent thought is not encouraged here.
  • Reply 8 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Nokmate View Post


    I think it has a lot to do with what you want and are used to. If you are used to a 1970 Polo then a 2008 Golf GTI is fantastic.



    To me the iPhone is an iPod trying to be a smartphone. It is great for someone who likes to play music and maybe use some smartphone features. The N97 on the otherhand is a smartphone thru and thru. To compare the two would be like comparing a stereo system to a laptop.



    It's great that Nokia are pushing the hardware envelope, even if cramming in all those goodies produces a phone that is almost 3/4" thick.



    For me the killer app for phones is the Web Browser, and having tried a lot of them, only the G1 comes anywhere near to the iPhone in terms of producing a fast and intuitive web experience. The Nokia browser on the N95 was horrible.



    I could not use the N95 for I need to do. It's just not fast enough to navigate a page, and render the page in a readable way.



    I'm interested to see whether they have improved the web experience on the N97 - but if they have not. I'll stick to my stereo thank you very much.



    C.
  • Reply 9 of 49
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    iPhone killer? Yeah maybe if you layed this behemoth on top of an iphone.



    Feel free to carry around your chunk of a phone but I have a natural aversion to

    products that cannot decide if they want to be touch or not. I'll pass.
  • Reply 10 of 49
    carniphagecarniphage Posts: 1,984member
    You can't see many women wanting a Phone that is 3/4" thick.



    I *do* like the widgets though.



    The iPhone has only two visual appearances for applications.

    As icons (with or without notification badges)

    and as full-screen applications.



    The widget is a sort of halfway house. The greater screen real-estate allows richer notification information. It would be good for stock tickers, weather, paused media etc.



    I like this, and I hope Apple steals it.



    C.
  • Reply 11 of 49
    Quote:

    I could not use the N95 for I need to do. It's just not fast enough to navigate a page, and render the page in a readable way.



    Really? The N95 browser is not the fastest, but it certainly does an excellent job of rendering web pages exactly as you'd expect to see them on your desktop PC. I browse for hours a day on my N95 and it is anything but unusable! It's absolutely brilliant for forums. I had an iPod Touch for a brief while and it rendered pages pretty much identically to that.
  • Reply 12 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mrochester View Post


    Really? The N95 browser is not the fastest, but it certainly does an excellent job of rendering web pages exactly as you'd expect to see them on your desktop PC. I browse for hours a day on my N95 and it is anything but unusable! It's absolutely brilliant for forums. I had an iPod Touch for a brief while and it rendered pages pretty much identically to that.



    Not to mention on the Nokia browsers, the entry forms worked properly and did not crash the browser the way Safari does/did.
  • Reply 13 of 49
    carniphagecarniphage Posts: 1,984member






    The iPhone uses antialiased and proportional fonts, not the nasty fonts that Nokia uses. This means text is legible even when the characters are a few pixels high.



    The screen scrolls and zooms smoothly. At least 20 frames per second. Because there is a PowerVR GPU doing all the work.



    The Nokia screen has this rectangle thing that you move around in discrete jumps, each jump is accompanied by a painful CPU redraw, sometimes that redraw is 1/2 second long. The whole thing feels clunky. Navigation relies on multiple button presses.



    For me its a deal-breaker. If you can put up with that, fine. But the web usage stats don't lie.



    C.
  • Reply 14 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Carniphage View Post








    The iPhone uses antialiased and proportional fonts, not the nasty fonts that Nokia uses. This means text is legible even when the characters are a few pixels high.



    The screen scrolls and zooms smoothly. At least 20 frames per second. Because there is a PowerVR GPU doing all the work.



    The Nokia screen has this rectangle thing that you move around in discrete jumps, each jump is accompanied by a painful CPU redraw, sometimes that redraw is 1/2 second long. The whole thing feels clunky. Navigation relies on multiple button presses.



    For me its a deal-breaker. If you can put up with that, fine. But the web usage stats don't lie.



    C.



    You would have a credible answer there if you posted a picture of, or were talking about, the Nokia Web browser instead of Opera Mini. In addition, I would absolutely *love* to see a video of you selecting the links on the left hand side of the iPhone picture without a) pressing something you didn't intend to press b) having to constantly zoom in and out to make the desired link big enough so you don't miss-hit it. Try pressing the tiny 1, 2, 3, page numbers at the bottom of a forum thread on the iPhone without mashing every link around it. It's nigh on impossible without having to zoom in and out constantly. This is what really really irritated me about the browser on the iPod Touch. Those problems are solved by the Nokia web browser, and others, by having a mouse pointer you move around with the d-pad, which is far more akin to the desktop web experience, and far more precise too. It took longer to browse around on the iPod Touch with the double tapping to zoom in and zoom out, and the inevitable pressing the back key when you did hit the wrong link, instead of just getting exactly what you wanted everytime with a mouse pointer/D-Pad driven browser. You've got to be kidding yourself if you think the web was designed for the imprecise nature of finger based control... if it was, we'd all be using touch screen PCs.
  • Reply 15 of 49
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    I'm going to get a new phone soon and I keep looking at iphone alternatives just to be impartial and the rest of the mobile phone manufacturers still don't offer the same experience.



    Even if this N97 comes close and has some better features, the amount of good apps for the iphone will be huge come June 2009 when the N97 will come out.



    Maybe Apple will bring out an updated version by then too - a 32GB version anyway.



    Suffice to say, everyone I know who has the iphone (7 people) loves it and has no complaints. I've used their ones a lot and I can't see many things wrong.



    I'd probably prefer to jailbreak mine though, not unlock it as I find the contracts to be fairly reasonable. I want the ability to install any app I choose and customize it however I want - hopefully it won't affect the SDK like remote debugging.



    I think it's good that the competition is heating up (well, warming up) so that it doesn't let Apple get lazy. I'm already getting a bit tired of the iphone design. But there's a long way to go before the competition will steer people away from the iphone.



    If all else fails, it's still an ipod, which no other mobile device includes.
  • Reply 16 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    I'm going to get a new phone soon and I keep looking at iphone alternatives just to be impartial and the rest of the mobile phone manufacturers still don't offer the same experience.



    Even if this N97 comes close and has some better features, the amount of good apps for the iphone will be huge come June 2009 when the N97 will come out.



    Maybe Apple will bring out an updated version by then too - a 32GB version anyway.



    Suffice to say, everyone I know who has the iphone (7 people) loves it and has no complaints. I've used their ones a lot and I can't see many things wrong.



    I'd probably prefer to jailbreak mine though, not unlock it as I find the contracts to be fairly reasonable. I want the ability to install any app I choose and customize it however I want - hopefully it won't affect the SDK like remote debugging.



    I think it's good that the competition is heating up (well, warming up) so that it doesn't let Apple get lazy. I'm already getting a bit tired of the iphone design. But there's a long way to go before the competition will steer people away from the iphone.



    If all else fails, it's still an ipod, which no other mobile device includes.





    What you are seeing are two devices in my opinion. The Nokia device is truly a phone, a smart phone, while the iPhone is an iPod that happens to make telephone calls and has some basic telephony functions but is not, I repeat, is not a smart phone.
  • Reply 17 of 49
    It's a nice phone but it's no closer to iphone than the 5800. Nokia are yet to match iphones interface. Nokia will always have more features but they are still missing that touch screen goodness that makes everyone love iphone. No xenon flash as well meh.
  • Reply 18 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bavlondon2 View Post


    It's a nice phone but it's no closer to iphone than the 5800. Nokia are yet to match iphones interface. Nokia will always have more features but they are still missing that touch screen goodness that makes everyone love iphone. No xenon flash as well meh.



    You can't really complain about the lack of a xenon flash when the iPhone has no flash at all. As for the UI. Yes, Apple has the slick UI but as a phone it fails miserably except to most North Americans that do not know the difference anyway, but the N97 will appeal to those people that have no desire for an iPhone and I would safely guess that there are millions more that want this than those that want an iPhone.
  • Reply 19 of 49
    carniphagecarniphage Posts: 1,984member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mrochester View Post


    You would have a credible answer there if you posted a picture of, or were talking about, the Nokia Web browser instead of Opera Mini. In addition, I would absolutely *love* to see a video of you selecting the links on the left hand side of the iPhone picture without a) pressing something you didn't intend to press b) having to constantly zoom in and out to make the desired link big enough so you don't miss-hit it.



    Sorry. I googled for a Nokia web browser image, and picked the best looking one. Nokia's website is not a great source for this stuff.



    The thing is, zooming in, clicking and zooming out is so fast on the iPhone it is not a big deal.

    What *is* difficult is reading anything at all on the N95. The lack of sub-pixel anti-aliasing means that effectively screen is only 1/4 the area of the iPhone.



    Take the iPhone, tape over 3/4 of the screen, and remove the ability to scroll. Replace all the fonts with Uglee Sans and you get a very Nokia-like experience.



    Anyhow, what I think is irrelevant.



    There are countless millions of S60 browsers out there. And *no one* is using the browser. Symbian phones outnumber iPhone by 10 to 1 and yet iPhone users are out-browsing Symbian by 20 to 1. How come iPhone users are browsing 200 times more often than Symbian users? Why is that?



    Or look at gaming. Nokia has been chasing the mobile gaming space for nearly a decade. Starting with their abysmal N-Gage platform. They retain the name for their gaming service.

    The entire number of registered N-Gage users is *less* than the number of people who bought SuperMonkeyBall. Why is that?



    I will be interested to see if they have improved things for the N97, and like I say, I really like the widgets.



    But so far we have only seen one video of the N97 in action, and the interface seems to be running at about 7 frames per second. Why is that?



    C.
  • Reply 20 of 49
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Carniphage View Post


    There are countless millions of S60 browsers out there. And *no one* is using the browser. Symbian phones outnumber iPhone by 10 to 1 and yet iPhone users are out-browsing Symbian by 20 to 1. How come iPhone users are browsing 200 times more often than Symbian users? Why is that?



    Or look at gaming. Nokia has been chasing the mobile gaming space for nearly a decade. Starting with their abysmal N-Gage platform. They retain the name for their gaming service.

    The entire number of registered N-Gage users is *less* than the number of people who bought SuperMonkeyBall. Why is that?



    I will be interested to see if they have improved things for the N97, and like I say, I really like the widgets.



    But so far we have only seen one video of the N97 in action, and the interface seems to be running at about 7 frames per second. Why is that?



    C.





    Those are some interesting facts I honestly never knew about that games part.
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