The N97 is Nokia’s latest “Yes, it will kill the iPhone” contender. After the really poor showing of the N96 in games performance (they decided, during the same year that the iPhone would come out with graphics hardware beating most handheld consoles, to leave out the graphics hardware accelerator in the N96), the N97 has a little bit of an expectation to beat. The phone itself has a neat pop-up screen that really reminds me of the old Psions and runs S60 (bleagh!) and you can tell the interface was derived from the latest system software for the N800 series of their Internet Tablets. The biggest issues I can see are going to be the chiclet keyboard and the choppiness of the UI and video playback in this demo video.
That, and the fact they show the phone doing everything except actually making a telephone call.
From a hardware point of view, it’s inoffensive. From a software point of view, they need to stop scrimping on CPUs and graphics hardware as it just looks slow, clunky and choppy.
Back to the drawing board, guys, you can do better.