Nokia N97 : Photographs or Snapshots ?

The Nokia n97 had been the perfekt phone until i slid open the camera cover.

- quoted by a saddened me.

Formalities first, the Nokia N97 sports a 5 Megapixel cam that is capable of shooting in 2584×1938 res and has f/2.8 Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, autofocus, video (VGA@30fps, H.263/MPEG-4), dual LED flash, f/2.8, 5.4 mm focal length, and a useless 4× digital zoom.

Nokia has put great specs for it's cameras on the NSeries devices and our Nokia N97 is no exception. It has Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and DVD quality video recording that puts Apple iPhone’s camera to sulk away in shame. And that's where it ends.

My initial impressions were high about the N97s camera, but that was because the N97 had a superbright screen that produces astounding pictures when compared to my n95. Viewing those pics on my PC gave me a taste of the actual situation.

Problem No.1:

Using the dual-LED flash at night is trouble. Most of the pics that i shot resulted in a yellowish-grey blur at the bottom-left corner of the screen. At first i thought it was my finger, but the next shot had it as well. "Dirt..?", I cleaned the lens with the cloth Nokia provided but the blur remained. A coupla shots later the blur dissapeared! Dunno what caused it, but the blogosphere has many cases of similar blurs appearing on the other N97s as well. It's been attributed to the flash. It seems that the closeness of the dual flash and the camera cover may be reflecting some of the LED light back onto the edges of the lens which results in the blur. This probably means that Nokia messed up the cam cover design.

Problem No.2:

The auto-focus on the n97 is fast. Way faster than the n95 but it isn't always reliable. Some of the pics that i took produced a different image from the one i was viewing when i pressed the shutter button. The difference in the images is the focus - I'd have focused on one object but the final pic is shown focusing on a different object.

Shown Here ==>
And like it's predecessor the 5800XM, the Nokia N97 does not have any problems taking pictures in low light - unless the flash comes into play. This picture was taken in pitch dark conditions.


Here are the pics of a Nokia N95 on the right and the N97 on the left:

Related topics:

Nokia N97: Soundwave

Nokia N97: Frustrations

Nokia N97: Eye candy

Nokia N97: Eye candy

For one, I'm impressed by how Nokia has managed to miss all the cool transition effects on this phone. For goodness sakes, they've even managed to get away without transitions on that "Swipe away the widgets" thing that they had been so laudable about. The swipe at best vanishes the widgets. They could have at least put in some of the transitions that came on the N78 with it's FP2 OS. The fact that they managed to add touch scrolling on the web browsers is an attempt. In my experience, it always ended up crashing my Opera Mini. GMail is another story.

Conclusion: The N97 video released by Nokia shows their dream - reality is totally different. This phone has ZERO eye candy.

Nokia N97: Frustrations

There are some things touchscreens won't provide. And that is the ease of use provided by shortcuts. Apps such as Opera Mini and the GMail app have been designed to make accessing the internet and email unbelievably easy. With numpad shortcuts most functions whether it be saving a bookmark or archiving email, they can be done within a moments thought. If I want to archive my mail my fingers automatically move to those shortcuts. On the N97 i would still be correcting my aim with the stylus at the puny buttons on the GMail app.

I still haven't found out the forward shortcut of Opera Mini for the N97.. Occasionally I get stuck at the search page because of this. Not to mention the odd cases of Opera suddenly going kaput when i flick my fingers to scroll through.

Another thing that i came across is the absence of the paste feature from the keyboard view.. Grrr.

Current state of mind: Frustrated!