I have been spoilt rotten with the iphone, it has the fantastic "best on the market touchscreen" imo - i admit it has a totally shit battery life and has recently been crashing (or maybe the app has) a lot. even with all that said it is imo the perfect media phone for listening to, watching music and video and scrolling by my tweets is a joy to use. just so you know, i have never used a crackberry - i always feel that when i see with crackberry owners that shortly after you see one then an ibm thinkpad or vaio will appear to compliment it - you know who you are you "have not got time to learn another system" people. one word people. spacebar.. it's downhill from here.. ...
the problem with the touchscreen on the nokia is that if you have come from an iphone experience you are going to be highly dissapointed with the feedback and tactile nature of the unit. i was hoping that nokia would be able to do something really smart here and compete with apple with the sexy, sleak way operating the iphone gives. i have found the nokia to be less of an enjoyable experience with it actually hindering me in operation. the actual screen is really good but i felt myself pressing the screen many times to accept my actions and then in other situation accidently clicking things that i did not want to. apple have spent a lot of time fine tuning and getting the most out of their touchscreen, the differences in approch and technology are huge. the nokia feels more clunky in operation and requires a harder swipe and press where as the iphone feels more like a fresh breeze on a terrace somewhere in italy on a hot sunny morning. i had hoped for a lot more.
your social launchpad
you have to tip your hat to nokia, they do innovate they understand the requirement for them to support social sites straight away, the frontend launch panel is fantastic and i would like to see a more customized frontend. the display in vertical mode looks huge and the presentation is sharp and "at a glance" easy to use. i did see some weird rendering issues with the weather plugin. it felt very much like the social panel was a last minute addition to "do something interesting" on the phone. i actually found the phone quite slow to load applications compared to my iphone3g which as a power user was annoying. for someone having a touchscreen nokia (even first phone) would be probably not notice this however.
16:9 video would have made this interesting
some of the videos i had seen about the nokia n97 before it was launched suggested that the camera was going to be a more uprated version with a 16:9 recording option. this was one of the main reasons i was attracted to the n97. ever since the nokia n95 (the official videoblogging phone of choice) i have always hoped that nokia would produce an IP camera - a decent carl zeiss lens, wifi and an open source firmware that you could feed it different video conversation sites - seesmic, tokbox, 12seconds and all the rest of them. The wifi enabled 30fps flip/vado/zi6 style IP would be the holy grail camera for the small content producer and the first to release a decent lowlight SD/HD camera with a SD slot and the ability to take batteries will capture a huge section of customer base.
is it time for nokia to ditch symbian
when the nokia n95 was first announced as a videoblogger i was excited about the prospect of the wifi enabled 5megapixel camera becoming my prime videoblogging/streaming camera. the first version that was released was not ready, the camera was sluggish and the phone rebooted regularly, the firmware and the OS were just not ready for the hardware. expecting new users to get firmware and having no mac support really upset me and left me with a bad taste in my purchase - one that made me look around and ultimately settle on the iphone.
