AceNik's Portal

It’s been a long time coming, but after dabbling with touch on the midrange 5800, Nokia has finally brought a touchscreen to an S60 “N-Series” smartphone, the N97. Take a look at our hands-on impressions and the complete rundown on Nokia’s new flagship.

But it’s not quite a full dive into touch—there’s still a horizontal QWERTY keyboard hidden below the 3.5″ 640×360 resistive touchscreen and accesable via a smooth 30° flip mechanism. The N97 will run an even further touch-enhanced Symbian OS, S60 v5, which features the 5800′s quick contacts bar and adds an assortment of customizable desktop widgets that can pipe in your Facebook info, RSS feeds and the like, much like those found on Nokia’s internet tablet OS. The widgets will be open to third party developers and available via the traditional “Downloads” Symbian app “for now” says Nokia—so not quite the App Store equivalent fans would hope for, but customization via software add-ons is definitely the route being pursued here.

But alas, the downsides. Characteristically for Nokia, the N97 is aimed at Europe and Asia first. So big ballers in Moscow and Macau can expect to be toting an N97 sometime in the “first half of 2009,” with a U.S. release (with the appropriate 3G bands) to follow “soon after.” In Europe it’ll run a hefty €550 ($695) unsubsidized.

The model we briefly handled tonight in NYC was, of course, the Euro version, with no U.S. 3G (and, sadly, no Wi-Fi network availabile). Its handlers were keeping it close to the vest, and with no connectivity there wasn’t much testing to be done, but we can say that the hardware is indeed pretty—befitting a $700 Nokia piece. The desktop Symbian widgets look nice, but the drawbacks of a resistive touchscreen (there, as always, to ensure character recognition via a stylus for Nokia’s Asian market) were immediately noticeable when dragging widgets around the desktop.

Rounding out the gaudy specs are 32GB of on-board memory (with 16GB more available via microSD), A-GPS with Nokia’s refreshed Maps 3.0 app and a compass, accelerometer for landscape/portrait screen switching, 5MP camera with Zeiss lens and LED flash, 3.5mm headphone jack, and N-Gage support.

But what we’re most interested in here are some jabs that Anssi Vanjaki, Executive Vice President (Markets) for Nokia, took directly at Google. Three quarters of the way into his monologue which he delivered in dramatic fashion, he made some direct barbs at Google which I have tried to republish word for word but for which I can only be credited as paraphrasing:

“There is a company that wants to index the world. We are going to go deeper and coordinate the world. Not just standard like a standard GOOOOGLE Map. A map that is dynamic with vector graphics…. etc…”

Notice all the O’s in Google? Yeah… he said it like that and with a spooky, ominous tone that came off as a “yucky” kind of “nanny-nanny-boo-boo”. First of all perhaps Mr. Vanjaki should be a bit more familiar with Google’s goals. Here is Google’s actual mission statement:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I think “indexing the world” and “organizing the world’s information to make it universaly accessible and useful” are quite different. I think Nokia is perhaps just a little ticked off that a little website that just conducted internet searches at a weird sounding URL is now threatening their market share.

Taking Google head-on by name was an interesting approach but not one that I think serves Nokia best. When you go out of your way to insult another company at your own companies self-proclaimed revolutionary announcement, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. Nokia is obviously nervous that Google’s Android seems poised to take off while the Symbian Foundation still has a lot of groundwork to lay. Those words made Nokia seem vulnerable and threatened.

I don’t want to take TOO much away from Nokia. To their credit the device looks pretty darn sweet, its packed with multimedia capabilities and seems quite functiona although you need to really play with one for awhile to determine that. But I felt that this whole Nokia-Google comment needed to be addressed because it stuck out like a sore thumb in the presentation… or am I the only one who was slightly shocked by the comparison?