Nokia throws up "pre-order soon" logo on US N97, drives the kids crazy
By Darren Murph 
posted Apr 30th 2009 9:26AM
posted Apr 30th 2009 9:26AM
[Via phoneArena]
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THe N97 has a weak 434 MHz processor... it removed my desire of it...
I'm sure its not as bad as you like to think it is. You don't hear CPU complaints from 5800 owners.
Yeah that's giving me doubts too. I'm going to wait for the reviews, not taking a chance on pre-order. If they says it's anywhere near as sluggish as the 9500 or the E90 I'm skipping it and going Pre.
Oh, and all of a sudden the CPU of a mobile phone becomes a key factor. This place is nuts. Congratulations Engadget & co. for making the average consumer even more ignorant.
@ papari: This is not just a phone... It is a smartphone... a PDA, and CPU speed does matter, as it is supposed to do more than just phone calls. And you call us ignorant.
@ zhepxiii The 5800 does not have half of what the N97 is marketed to have. And if you read more, there are issues with the 5800 CPU, it is slow, sluggish and laggy.
@ papari: just because you have no need to run multiple apps and/or watch video with a respectable resolution doesn't mean that holds true for the rest of the world. If you don't believe CPU speed is a relevant factor in current-gen smartphones, go pick up an older one and try some multi- or super-tasking,
considering...
330mhz on e90
369mhz on 5800
434mhz sounds pretty good. N97 should be 25% faster than the others. This will also help it compete with battery life.
Also keep in mind, s60 OS runs much different than android or the iphone's OS X. OS X requires a strong processor, the OS is very similar to the OS that runs on their desktop.
android and iphone's os are made to be mini-computers first, adding telephone functionality later.
s60 is phone centered, adding computer functionality on top of that.
s60 is harder to program for because of the lower level programing.. however, it's also more efficient.
thats my take anyway.
SirPhunkee: Nobody "needs" to do any of the things you mentioned.
A goddamn cell phone should place and receive calls. Full screen video? Multiple apps? Get a fucking life.
It's not like your doing some heavy scientific calculations on your PDA, right? It all comes down to the overall design. You can't do a good comparison between the performance of the CPU and its type in an environment like this. That's what I was talking about.
It is easier to compare two PC's running Windows and come to the conclusion that the one with the faster CPU is a little faster. These two devices and their software aren't identical. Besides if the Samsung has a 720p video recording and a heavier GUI it's reasonable that they need a higher performance CPU but it doesn't mean you would ever feel the need for a faster CPU on an N97.
If you start to base your buying decisions on technical aspects like these then you better make sure you know EXACTLY what you're looking for. Otherwise you'll end up in the same kind of situation where you end up buying a speaker system by estimating it's performance solely by how many watts it can produce...
@dziban WHAT THE HECK THEN ARE YOU DOING ON ENGADGET????? This is the place to learn about technological breakthroughs. About little things doing great things...
Maybe it is not him that needs to get a life, but you that can't afford the new technology and envy is breathing through your pores.
Newsflash of the 21st century: SmartPhone are used by professional to check e-mail, review documents, etc.
Don't just type because you have a keyboard. Use your brain buddy.
Pretty cool but it won't be a match for the iPhone
Agreed, this phone is a complete failure with it's new improved, but still archaic OS.
Symbian OS is far from archaic and that review of Symbian is usually given by people who appear to have little understanding between the distinction between user interface and operating system.
Symbian OS is far more advanced than any other mobile OS, especially with regards to SMP.
More of a regional thing. It won't make a dent in the US because carriers can't interested, iPhone hype and the fact that lots of useful applications are focused on the US. Europe and Asia are more Nokia friendly, and while the iPhone's platform still has tons more applications, people look for different things (more emphasis on the camera, for example).
It probably won't be in the US because there's no carrier deal.
In Europe and Asia it'll comfortably match or beat sales just like the N95 did against the original iPhone and the 5800 is doing against the 3G.
I don't think this phone is that bad at all, but considering its glaring flaws it's sure to be overpriced. (And yes, I realize the whole unlocked thing)
i have heard it will cost 599€ with no contracts. and after carrier subsidies i'm sure it's going to be affordable enough.
iphone this, iphone that, is there an app to shut you people up?!
LOL!! I wish.
Sure. After you people stop the anti-Apple trolling in Apple stories and posting about the Pre in iPhone stories.
I'm all for phone and gadget news but having is having a 'preorder coming soon' button posted to the site really news worthy?
Yes. It means is coming soon and you an pre-order it. You bet how many people will e glad when that headlines is posted here about the Pre.
Sure it is. People are interested in this stuff. Usually we read engadget to find out about gadgets that just hit the market or are about to hit it not archaic stuff.
BTW: S60 is not archaic. I own a symbian device and I really don't feel the need for a netbook(and I'm sure I'm not the only one).
Omg! Am so getting this baby, my long wait will soon be over.
How much is it?
one million dollars
too late, the N97 is already old. They waited too long.
well guys if i get an unlocked pre and insert my orange contract sim card in ( which as no unlimited internet) would the pre run me up a huge bill because its an online phone ? ( i wouldnt go online ) but the phone is always online right ?
Any GSM phone can be "always online". You're charged by the data you transfer, not how long you're connected. So as long as you don't have any applications running and connected to the net, you'll be fine. In which case you may as well disable the always-online aspect.
Why would you even want a smartphone with no internet connection? Seems pretty pointless to me, just get a cheap flip-phone if all you're doing is making phone calls.
Every American review I've seen of the 5800 was negative. Is this phone going to be rocking a significantly overhauled OS? I think Symbian is just too different from WinMo, Blackberry, and iPhone to ever catch on in the states. It seems to require a level of familiarity with the way that it does things that we in the US just don't have because it's such a rare platform over here.
is there away on the pre of disabling online mode ?
and i want the pre its a nice phone and id use it only on wifi noobish i know but its a cool phone.
The anti and pro N97 comments have been hilariously flying on the Symbian-specific message boards. Like, serious, all-out fights.
If Nokia was hoping to get people up in arms, they certainly chose the right processor.
But if they wanted the right chip for sales numbers, well, I guess we'll find out when it launches. Unfortunately, I know that I won't be there.
Yeah, this bad boy is definitely stirring up some controversy all over the net. Some outright hate it, some love it, some just don't give a damn. All this publicity can't be entirely bad for Nokia, can it? At least they seem to be responding to it a lot better than they used to back in the day. I hope to see some downright excellent phones towards the end of the year.
I'll definitely be up on the reviews of this. I have been waiting for a new Nokia. I have rocked a iPhone & iPod Touch for quite some time, and just can't dig it. Selling my iPod touch because my N810 does everything it does + I can actually change the GUI. I do enjoy the open structure that Nokia offers, and I like taking my phone with me to other countries and throwing a local SIM card in. The roaming rates on ATT & Verizon are freakin terrible.
So, yeah, I want to know if the processor stinks, or if it can hang with the awesomeness that they are advertising.
I don't seem to care anymore.
For those of you whining about the cpu, symbian doesn't require a pc's processor to run, unlike a winmo, android or even mobile osx. A humble 250mhz cpu is enough to run symbian and its third party apps hassle free. So 434mhz is more than enough for the N97.
To Nokia:
Another classic fail on Nokia's part!
Nokia has announced closure dates for Mosh and Widsets through e-mails and news releases along with the eventual replacement of these services by the new Ovi Store.
However, the smarts at Nokia have not included anything about when the Ovi Store is actually going to launch. Everywhere I read, it says the store is set to launch in May - but what's the date mate!??
A quick search of the Nokia website only adds to the ineptitude: http://europe.nokia.com/A41447096?wsid=1008&charset=ISO-8859-1&qt=ovi+launch+date&GO.x=6&GO.y=13
In my opinion, the only thing going for Nokia is the fact that S60 has multi-tasking and some of their phones support US 3G (AT&T).
Nokia, you are really trying hard to piss me off:
Customers are screaming what they want to see in the phones - but the honchos are too busy squandering their riches from the past (Programs which work in Silos like Nokia contacts, Friendview, etc).
Specific rants:
1. Ditch the cheap plastic cases - seriously! They are obvious and cheesy - N85 is a big fail because of it.
2. Use capacitive touch - I don't care what the hell your engineers say. Spend one hour with the iPhone and you will see how effortless capacitive is versus resistive.
3. Promote a standardized look and feel for apps through your SDK. Maintain customer expectation/experience and quality across all apps - created by Nokia or by a third-party developer. Does it even occur to you that’s one primary reason the iphone is so popular?
4. E71 - the camera is a joke compared to N73, which is three years older. This is not the precedent you want to set. News to you - technology should move forward - not backwards. The iPhone with a 2MP camera without flash takes phenomenally better pictures in daylight – that even after 3 E71 firmware updates. Get it? Fire the e71 camera division. It’s even worse when Nokia does not even accept they screwed up. And you wonder why Nokia has no market share in the US (hint the 5800 launch fiasco).
5. Firmware updates across the board!? E61 – just 3 years old – is a business phone. The browser sucks. It crashes all the time or runs out of memory. It’s an older version. UPDATE it! I paid $450 for that. You can’t leave it in the dirt after two years of half-hearted support. Why are your firmware updates 6 months apart? It’s unacceptable. The market and internet is evolving too fast for you to sit on your butt; either reduce the number of devices per service line (that’s another story) if you can’t handle them or hire more/smarter people.
6. EMEA, NAM, etc f/w update versions. Based on the updates you shoot out every 3-6 months, your QA guys are probably smoking crack. Even obvious fails slip through them. I can understand that hardware may differ over region-specific phones but it doesn’t warrant 3 month gaps between the region specific updates. Learn from your competitors – because these things will eat you if you don't acknowledge (Hint: Zune jokes). The end of your domination is already here – accept it to maintain ground. The 5800 alone will not save you and based on your price-range to specs for N97, I won’t count on that device either (LED instead of Xenon for a $700 phone? Maybe your giving the wrong kind of porn to your product gurus - it's turning them into sludge).
7. Widgets. Do you remember; 2 years ago, at an announcement – you mentioned that there will be widgets, which will let users input their flight details and in turn the widget will alert them about flight arrival or departure delays, airport conditions, etc? The services to offer this information are already here – e.g. FlightStats.com. But I don’t see the widgets anywhere?! What happened? Good idea/selling point but sounds like someone fell asleep. This should have been one primary focus of multitasking capability in a phone.
8. E-series. Aah… the award-winning phone that no credible reviewer had the balls to take a pock shot at. Instead, pussy-arsed reviewers sounded like they were done a favor with a review handset when they justified the poor camera performance, ‘oh, it’s a business phone; its primary function is not to take pictures.’ If that’s the case, then why the hell has it packed a shitty e-mail client for 4 years; even on its newest iteration? Oh, and why does the phone not recognize calendar invites!? Even gmail has worked that shit out. Inexcusable! Do you guys even test your own devices in a non-Nokia-centric environment at all? I didn’t think so. BTW, Nokia email is a paid for app eventually, it is not a replacement for the inbuilt messaging client. A client and service are two different entities and should be maintained so if you want people to use your devices anywhere. For e.g. your browser doesn’t just work with your servers now, does it?
9. RAM. Why do your phones even today have minuscule amounts of RAM – usually just enough to get by - even though the prices have dropped exponentially?
10. Call log – how did you manage to screw this up even more? Call log used to work fine on the E61. But with the FP1 / E71, every incoming call is shown as a ‘cell phone icon’ even if the number is associated with a land line. Also, why are you not using different icons for work, home, cell phones? Is that rocket science? BTW, what’s QA been up to – at this point you might want to call a narcotics raid on them. Don’t get me wrong, you had it working right a few years back. I know you’re new to the concept so repeat after me: technology should move forward - not backwards – with time.
11. Call log 2 – Where does all the information related to the call log get hidden? Because when I used synble, I noticed that it was able to extract a hell of a lot more information from the call log than the phone's client. This is just sick. Winmo phones allow you to store THIRTY days worth of information. Not only that, I can go into a contact, and view my call history for that contact including durations for every call as long as it was all within the 30-day limit. Obviously synble has managed to pull a lot of it out from my E71. But shouldn't this have been part of your phone? So tell me, do you use any phones from your competitor at all? It might be wise to make a few purchases; right about now. Plus, if you want to learn from your competitor, you have to use it as your primary phone for 30 days and then go back to a Nokia and see what you can improve. This is the EASIEST way to improve/add features without investing into any 'smart' people for R&D and probably should have been your first step.
12. Call log 3 – You know how right after you’ve called a contact or received a call, you want to try to call that contact again but but maybe at another number from the contact profile? Well guess what – you have to go through the address book to look at the other numbers. Yes, you can’t open the contact profile or alternate calling numbers from the call log itself. WTF? Talk about basic UI workflow/routing design fail. At this point, I’m beginning to think you have someone on the design/QA team with a mild narcolepsy problem.
13. Contacts – Have you ever noticed how ‘easy’ it is to ‘delete’ a contact but hard to 'undo' edits/deletes? I would think by the 5th iteration of S60 you would have got that down to a pat. I can hit the ‘back’ key and get a prompt to hit delete a contact. Nice. But if it’s a mistake, then what? I’m outta luck until the next time I sync. Plus, if my phone is set to sync automatically, then I will lose the information from my PC as well, if it comes in range with my computer (I use Bluetooth and sutosync) or if I forget about restoring the information before I re-sync. Did it EVER fucking occur to you that if you want to make deletion easy you have to make recovery just as easy, huh? Didn't think so. I am now beginning to think, Nokia folks secretly don't use their own phones.
14. Contacts 2: While we’re at it. If you begin to edit a contact and mid-way you decide to ‘cancel’ or discard all changes made to the contact (you haven’t saved yet). There is no way to do that. Seriously. I am sure many of you have noticed that by now – on FP1 at least – which is not that old and has seen tens of updates. From Nokia’s perspective, they probably want to ‘save’ all information on-the-fly as a user is typing to prevent accidental loss; which is a good thing. But would it kill ya' to also add a function to ‘discard’ all changes and revert back to previously saved version of the contact on the phone. It’s not rocket science again. UAT (User Acceptance Testing - probably a new term to you Nokia guys) – That should have caught this. You might want to schedule a deep talk with the some department heads.
15. Standard bookmarks in the browser that can’t be deleted. You asked for the hacking of your firmware. Because those bookmarks are useless and have never offered anything REMOTELY useful. They should have been removed from the browser by the second iteration 4 years ago. Or you should have built a team to develop content that's not discontenting. Besides, what’s wrong with allowing people rearrange those bookmarks? Plus the morons had to go right ahead and build a SEPARATE bookmark item for each link instead of putting them all in one folder called ‘Nokia’s junk’? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Instead of glorifying what you've accomplished, how about spending some time over the failures? Because it looks like they are being carried over iteration after iteration.
I can go on forever, but I am gonna stop here – cause as usual – you are probably not listening. But for your sake I hope you do!
Times have changed; it’s not just about the hardware anymore – but more about the software. Also, if you can’t make your software to interact with non-nokia phones over the internet then you’re wasting your time (Nokia Friendview, etc). There are many platforms to compute - the internet has always been social and your time as a leader has already been squandered.
When consumers spend $400 every 16 months for the past 6 years and have little to show for it. This is what happens.
I am SICK of the whole Nokia band-of-reviewers sucking on NOKIA dick and ignoring the most basic failures for the nth iteration.
E.g. Everyone is 'praising' the Nokia Messaging/Email app (the fuckers at Nokia couldn't even decide for 6 months whether to call it 'email' or 'messaging' drives the point when each already means something specific) but no one is chastising Nokia for the abysmal in-built e-mail client as unacceptable for $300+ phones - which will be the only 'free' alternative in a few months.
In fact, Europeans are screwed even harder since they pay 20% more for each phone but are happy with lower expectations! The Nokia 5800 unlocked (US 3G) is going for $299 (224 Euro). How can a $300 phone perform worse than a mid-range phone from 3 years ago!? (N73)
I have the right to call out a poorly managed product line especially when they have such haughty claims but little to show for. Nokia stopped innovating a long long time ago. I am only hoping that someone at Nokia pulls their head out of their arse, grows some balls and reads this entire post.
This vent was written in 10 minutes – so please excuse typos.
PS What's the ovi launch date?
Considering the N97 is already dated, I really hope Nokia is working on something truly special for the not too distant future!
Holy crap.
I dunno'. I really liked my N93 and E51. Still, I understand where you're coming from. There is so much to like about Nokia, there constant screw-ups are just infuriating to me.
Based on my experience with nokiausa.com for the 5800xm, I'm never gonna do a "pre-order" with them again. Actually, I'm not so keen on doing any sort of business with them ever again - I'll go with some other merchant- they got them at the same time and had the same prices anyway.
I'm talking about nokiausa.com as a retail website btw, not Nokia the phone manufacturer...
I played with it a few days ago. It's pretty nifty. A lot more solid than the 5800 (not surprisingly), but there's no multitouch screen, and the sensitivity is not awesome.This was naturally, however, a pre-release version, so it might get a lot better. I think it'll be another year before we start seeing some really cool stuff coming out of Espoo, and by then I'm afraid it may be a little late.