I arrived in London late evening on Wednesday as one of the cities we’ll be visiting in Europe for the next three weeks. I brought the Nokia N97 as my main device because I needed a phone with the new Ovi Maps, QWERTY keyboard, and nice camera. The trip just got started, but I already have some good and bad things to share.

Before leaving New York, I wanted to add the important places like hotels, train stations, sights, etc. into the Nokia N97 so I that I didn’t have to search for them in Europe. A great thing about Ovi Maps is that it lets users sync their favorite places between desktop and mobile devices. What’s not so great, is that Ovi Maps is not very accurate. For example it misplaced one of our hotels about two streets away from where it was supposed to be. I’m glad I double checked with Google Maps. To add the favorites from my laptop to the Nokia N97, I log into Ovi Maps on the phone, then click synchronize in the favorites menu.

After arriving in London Heathrow Airport, we followed the instructions from our hotel’s website and used the Underground (we call it the subway in New York). I used the free Ovi Maps walk navigation to find our way towards the hotel after getting off the train station. It worked perfectly. The Nokia N97′s 3.5 inch screen displayed easy to follow arrows and red dots as breadcrumbs as we walked. Since it was my first time using this feature on the Nokia N97, I waited about a minute to install the voice guide and load the map. I could’ve skipped these steps if I preloaded the map and guide with Maps Loader before we left.

It was half past 10 when we checked in at our hotel. We were hungry from the long flight and wanted to find a place to eat. I thought this was a perfect time to test the free Lonely Planet feature on Ovi Maps. Unfortunately, the phone kept freezing when I clicked on the option. I suspect it has something to do with the Nokia N97 not having enough RAM memory to perform the task. I was also running Gravity, the web browser, and Nokia Messaging at the same time.

That’s all for now. I’ll be sharing more of my experiences throughout our trip.