Nokia N97: the really bad things

WOMWorld provided the device as part of an Ovi Maps 3 The Good Things event (I'll write about it eventually but you can check out my twitter feeds with the #ovigoodthings hashtag in the meantime) in London that I attended on Thursday and Friday. The N97 has a GPS receiver, so it made sense to have a device that was capable of helping us on Thursday when we were made to run around London treasure hunting! And it failed to get a GPS fix for the whole couple of hours we were outdoors!! On a sunny clear day no-less!! Instead, I had to use my own E51 and the brilliantly accurate Navman B10 running the now outdated Nokia Maps 2 (Ovi Maps isn't compatible with the E51) to help with the tasks. I've never had problems getting a sub-one minute GPS fix with the E66, E71 and E75 - so I really had no idea how the N-series people can get it so wrong when it came to designing the N97's internal GPS aerial.

The hardware design is nice, if a bit none-iconic. It could do without that bulky 'lens' protector protector for one. Over complicated design for such a trivia thing is just silly - the lens protector protector probably takes up more space than the whole camera module (lens + sensor and whatever else is needed in getting a modern digital camera to work). Nokia isn't the only manufacturer guilty here though. Samsung with their obnoxious attempt at masking the tiny lens with a couple of huge over-engineered rings and bumps on the Omnia HD is one fine example, and the Sony Ericsson Satio another. Personally I think the lens protector protector probably costs more than its actual worth.

Series 60 5th Edition is nice and I really like it, but it is hampered by bugs - at least the one running on the N97. Why can't I copy and paste with the keyboard? Why am I forced to access the on-screen keypad to access copy and paste? Why does it crash and freeze all the time when I try to switch between opened applications or even when losing WLAN signal. Really, here you have a lovely piece of operating system but they gimped it with that lowly amount of RAM and processor speed. Half the issues I've encountered would probably be solved if Nokia would just fit in a better processor and another 64MB RAM module, the other half through quicker firmware updates. Stop with all the red tape and release the new firmware today.

So that is my rant for today. There are plenty of things to like about the N97 as well and I'll get onto these eventually.
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