Nokia N97

With summer settling in, the mobile phone market is set to sizzle with Nokia’s announcement that the much anticipated N97 is set to ship worldwide this month.

While unlikely to dethrone the the iPhone in the US with the hoards of Starbucks-bound Mac fan boys still snapping them up like hotcakes, the N97, worldwide, command some serious market share. Nokia’s have always been a personal favourite of mine and their build quality and functionality is superb.

While the HTC et al offers some nice features despite running Windows mobile, Nokia, like Apple understands their customer base and has designed the OS around the average consumer who wants to be able to easily upload pictures to Facebook, listen to some great tunes, and get powerful apps at the touch of a button.

The N97 satisfies all of these needs offering users a nice touch screen, 32 GBs of storage (expandable to 48 GBs with a microSD card) and a plethora of apps available from their OVI apps store.

It has a nice sized 3.5” tft screen that will really enhance the experience provided by Nokia’s exciting new Image Space MWC09 program. This feature in itself warrants its own blog post, but in a nutshell the phone is able to use GPS, accelerometers and a whack of fancy algorithms to spatially orient your photographs and tie them together in a virtual 3D tour. It is amazing.

The device also features a QWERTY keyboard, Nokia’s 5MP Camera with Carl Zeiss Lens and the HSDPA enabled Internet.

In short the device rocks. I just wish the Windows Mobile team would actually get up and do something to compete. WM6.1 and 6.5 are great for geeks who like to do things like ping nodes on a network, but when are they going to get the interface right? Kudos for Nokia for delivering again!