Finally: Nokia has released the n97 in limited numbers

[mania]

Mine arrived this morning at 8:05am .

[gslrallysport]

[AnthonyW]

I’ve got mine updated from a n95 8gb
What does everyone else think of their n97 ?

[hazrd]

we're still waiting on gregs review

[gslrallysport]

Woops... I got mine not last Friday, but the Friday before. I've had a decent play, but I was coming from a Samsung i450, so it was always going to be a step up.

Having not had a touch phone before I was nervousish about the speed of typing text's etc. please to say that provided you don't flip the keyboard out, it behalves just like a normal T9 keyboard, which I find is far quicker than having to type every letter on the mini qwerty one.

I'm a massive fan of the inbuilt FM transmitter, meaning you can use it like an ipod for your car. Downsides is that it gets slow pretty quick with apps open, web browsing is ok, but not fantastic, and the lack of any mpg or avi player (only 3gp and real player) is pretty poor also, considering my Samsung had one.

If it wasn't given to me for nothing (renewed high end business plan), I probably would've kept with my 5 phone tradition of Samsung... Not that I need to support the Korean economy any more, between half a dozen hyundai rally cars and Kumho rally tyres....

[mania]

I've had mine for a while too. Love it, but it isn't without it's quirks. My critical review .

The keyboard is great, I can type on it far faster then any other phone I've tried, and faster then an iphone power user I raced. There is a quirk though - enabling predictive is great, but it doesn't work well on the web where you can't see what it's doing easily at all. ie doesn't underline words. I do like the t9 touchscreen though, often use that.

The screen has a beautiful resolution and is easy to read, however the touch is not as good as an iphones, sometimes requiring to push the same spot twice to register. Mostly it's good though, it doesn't require a lot of pressure like a lot of resistive touch screens. A lot better then say the Samsung Ultra Touch. And considering that the touch screen is just another input on the phone, not the only input, it's more then satisfactory. Great for skipping around on menus, for all else you have the keyboard.

The camera is great - I don't mind at all not having a digital camera on me anymore, which is what I wanted. Some colours do wash out towards the edges, and the flash (being mounted so close to the camera) is not ideal, but it's still more then good enough for random photos. Big quirk: current n97s have a design flaw where the cover (which has 0mm clearance with the camera) scratches the camera, not present in other nokias (which have a raised gap for dust and crap to go under). Not too worried, as I'm sure warranty will cover getting the later cover fitted and lens plastic replaced scratch free.

OS is good, very customizable down to the positioning of each icon on the menus. Only quirk is that some parts of the phone have kinetic scrolling, ie web browsing, and others rely on fiddly scrollbars. Being fixed next OS update though. For some reason the phone comes with effects turned off, I don't understand why as it's a lot more slick with them on. ie fades as you rotate the phone, etc.

I actually really like the web browser, prefer it to my experience on iphones due to having a full keyboard without losing screen estate, makes filling in fields naturally. The best of any phone I've used - one quirk though, on opelaus it won't accept enter's inside the memos. Unless there's some trick I don't know about - this is annoying, makes it unusable for opelaus .

Plenty of apps already, many quite neat (ie one to play avis - called smartmovie), and I love being able to set my own ringtones and backgrounds from the phone. (dig at iphone users there ). Audio quality is fine from headphone jack.

It is a tiny bit bulkier then I'd like, but it's the price of having a keyboard. Overall I love it, but wouldn't unconditionally recommend it until the camera cover is fixed, kinetic scrolling is on all menus, and the predictive text is fixed.