First Look: Nokia N97

Nokia has finally launched its highly anticipated N97 smartphone. The device was unveiled in December, and eventually hit shelves in the UK last month, nearly seven months later.

We've managed to get our hands on one and, after a day with the phone, we're ready to give our initial impressions.

For a phone with a full slide out keyboard, the N97 is quite compact and light. It's not as slim as the E71, but it packs in a lot more and feels good in the hand.

The front of the device is dominated by the 3.5in resistive touch screen. The screen is pretty good, but nothing amazing, and the use of a resistive rather than capacitive touch screen means that it's not nearly as responsive. There is the option for tactile feedback which makes the device buzz every time a touch is registered, which helps to compensate.

Relying on the touch screen for input, the N97 has very few physical buttons. On the front are call answer and end buttons as well as a menu key, while on the right hand side you'll find a camera button and a volume up and down rocker. The left hand side simply has a keylock slider switch, making it very easy to lock the device and turn off the display and then quickly fire it back up again.

The keyboard is also a very minimalist affair. While this means the keys are nicely spaced, there are only three rows so you'll find yourself constant reaching for the 'alt' button to get at each key's secondary character, particularly when it comes to numbers.

To keep the layout down to a minimum the space bar has been moved over to the right and a navigation pad has been included on the left. The rather odd layout takes some getting used to, and the way the keys are raised makes typing slower than on other mobile keyboards.

When you slide out the keyboard on the N97, the screen tilts up, but unlike the HTC devices that feature a tilting screen, the N97 screen cannot be adjusted or flattened as the tilting is part of the slide mechanism rather than being hinged. The whole sliding mechanism feels solid and shouldn't break any time soon.

The N97 runs on Nokia's Symbian 60 fifth edition so most of the interface should be immediately familiar to anyone who has used any relatively recent Nokia device. What will be a bit different is the customisable home screen. The N97 allows users to drop up to five different widgets onto the screen, including dynamic and static applications such as weather reports, email, calendar, contacts, social networking or media.

While the customisable home screen is a nice touch, it is currently quite limited and there are some notable widgets missing, such as Twitter. As a whole, although the interface will be familiar to many users, it feels very dated and clunky compared to the slick presentation of platforms like Android or the iPhone.

The N97 boasts a whopping 32GB of onboard storage and, on the off chance that this isn't enough, up to 16GB can be added through a microSD slot.

It also features a 5-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and dual LED flash. There are mobiles out there with higher resolution cameras, but this one is certainly no slouch and should be more than adequate for the types of pictures you'll want to snap with a phone.

Nokia has done away with its long standing pin charger and adopted the new micro-USB slot standard for both charging and data connection, which is a very nice touch indeed. The company has also included a converter in the box for those of you with either the original or newer style of Nokia pin chargers.

The variety of different features makes the N97 a pretty decent all-round device. It has plenty of storage for music and media, a decent camera, a full hardware keyboard, a reasonably large touch screen and Symbian's solid operating system. That said, it feels like a jack-of-all-trades and master of none.

Had the N97 launched earlier this year we would have been a lot more impressed, but as it stands we can't help but think the N97 missed its time to shine.