Last Friday during the New York Nokia Users Meetup, I played with a Nokia N97 prototype. I’m now giving you my initial thoughts about the device. It’s nowhere near production because it kept crashing. Since the hardware is pretty much what we’ll see when it comes out, this preview will be based on that.

Erick from MWI with the Nokia N97. Photo by Will Sisti.

Slider

I inspected the sliding mechanism right away. It is very cool! It’s really firm. You hear nice solid clicks when you slide it up or down. The quality was so good that I was constantly sliding it up and down and didn’t notice any wobble to the sides. We’ll have to wait and see if the production models maintain this high quality.

Take a look at the video below and to inspect the slider. Head to the blog if the video is not visible in your RSS reader.

Keyboard

The keyboard layout was designed differently from a typical Qwerty keyboard. The spacebar is located to the right side. It took only a few minutes to get used to, so this is not an issue I’m worried about.

Keyboard close up

Last Friday, I was concerned that the Nokia N97 was missing a dedicated period button. I told everyone on Twitter that I couldn’t find it! I had to press the Chr button and then click the screen to select the period. A second look at the official press photos and other sources show it being to the right of the letter L. The prototype I played with had the letter Ñ.

I did not have any issues pressing the buttons. All the presses were recognized by the phone. If you were fine using the tiny keyboard on the Nokia E71, the N97 shouldn’t be a problem. The buttons also felt like hard rubber, different from the rest of the phone. The friction from the buttons’ surface helped me feel the separation.

Touchscreen

I’m not sure what I feel about navigating through the menu with the touch screen. For a prototype, the interface was very quick and responsive. My problem was sometimes a menu only needed one click, while others needed a double click. Very confusing, but I’ll wait for the final product to give my judgment.

Scrolling though lists is different from many of us are used to with the iPhone. For example, on the iPhone, you drag up to go down the list. On the Nokia N97, you guide down to go down the list. I hope you can imagine what I just said. We all know that there’s no multi-touch support so we can’t pinch or expand our fingers to zoom in or out of web pages or photos. I will honestly say that with the few hours I spent playing with the Nokia N97, I still preferred the “touch” experience on the iPhone.

Final Thoughts

I’m looking forward to the Nokia N97 because it has great potential. Like what I wrote previously, it could be the answer to my problem. Contributor Renegade Fanboy also chimed in that it will be an amazing device but there could be 5 reasons not to buy the N97. We’ll have to wait for the final retail version of the Nokia N97 to make our thorough review. I really hope Nokia does not disappoint us.