N97 Review Thrilling Review Conclusion - only recommended for S60 geeks

If I had money which I don't due to transitions in employment and the need to pay $8000 for a new roof, I would buy an N97 NAM with my own money. But, unfortunately (it pains me to slag Nokia since I desperately want Apple to have viable competition longterm and slagging Nokia is like slagging my first love since I loved my first cameraphone, the 1 megapixel Nokia 7610 I bought in 2004!)  I can not  recommend the Nokia N97 for other people i.e. people who are not already S60 geeks.

Buy an iPhone 3GS instead. Sure the camera on the 3GS s*cks compared to the N82, N95, N97, N86, etc but the software is a joy to use and the touch focus is something that Nokia should have done first. and there is a viable useful app ecosystem for the iPhone unlike Nokia (sure it may develop but there is no sign of it).

The N97 works for me because of these apps (in no order):

• ShoZu - Sorry Pixelpipe your service is unusable until Nokia fixes Share Online, sharing only 30 items at a time is a non starter for me.  The unreliable Share Online which has no cues about whether a photo has been uploaded already is a major annoyance.)
• Gravity - Gravity rocks, it's one of the best Twitter clients on any platform and is continually being improved! Gravity makes the N97 QWERTY keyboard useful instead of a frill. Without gravity, I'd be content with the superior camera of the N86 8MP and pecking away in g*d aweful T9)
• Nokia Sports Tracker is a must have for tracking your bicycle rides, walks,etc. It is full of annoyances like not remembering any of your preferences (I always want to share my Maps with everybody, please don't ask OVER AND OVER again) but works well and is very useful and works in the background unlike the iPhone trackers all of which are useless because the iPhone doesn't allow 3rd party apps to multi-task
• QIK, video streaming need I say more. It just works and keeps getting improved!

If you love the above apps or any of the other few (there are about 50 good apps on S60, on iPhone there are several hundred good apps!) good apps on S60, then that probably means you are an S60 geek and then the only choice in 2009 is either the N86 8MP or N97. However once a 5 megaxel iPhone with decent video comes out in 2010, then I fear Nokia at its current rate of stagnation won't even be able to keep S60 geeks like myself happy.

Why normal people should NOT buy  the N97:

• the UI is impossible to use for non S60 geeks, hand the N97 and iPhone 3GS to a newbie and may G*d have mercy on your soul :-) ! Can't stand S60 constantly nattering at you asking whether you want to connect or not, of course I do ! touch inconsistently works from screen to screen, app to app and a host of other UX issues
• the whole thing feels like a work in progress e.g. widgets are a great proof of concept but in reality aren't really that useful, e.g. the twitter and facebook widgets don't display enough useful info and autoscroll, they just display the last 10 or so status updates, these widgets feel like "hello world" rather than actually useful
• instability - e.g. I reset the phone via *#7370#, set the camera to sequence multiple shot mode and take 16 pictures and the camera app freezes; if Nokia can't get their camera app to work in 2009 no wonder ShoZu also has stability issues
• there's not enough RAM - even if you install all the apps on the built in 32GB mass memory you still run out of RAM

Pixelpipe has been very responsive for tech support via twitter and comments on this blog (thanks! i have done technical support in the past and appreciate the speedy service!) but unfortunately I am still having problems

I. Routing Tags not working

Summary: routing tags are not working, if i tag something "@f" without the quotes in the title or tags field or the body, it incorrectly gets posted to flickr.com/photos/roland instead of flickr.com/photos/wongtanglao

Here are the answers to the questions asked by Pixelpipe support:

1. pixelpipe support: "Try uploading to the 2nd account directly from Quick Post to verify it's been configured, if the upload goes to the 1st account log out of Flickr and add the 2nd account again."
   • Roland's response: I deleted "wongtanglao" which is the second account in pixelpipe and re-added it and then did a quick post from the web app i.e. firefox on my mac  to "wongtanglao" and it worked fine i.e. it went to the 2nd account which is wongtanglao!
2. pixelpipe support: "Are you using Share Online 4.30 (beta)? The latest version supports resume, background uploads and even has an Outbox which includes a status of your uploads."
   • Roland's response: I am using Share Online ver 4.3.09.19 S60 Version 5.0 (which I believe was installed when I updated my N97 to the V11 firmware which came out on July 1, 2009)

Herewith screenshots of my pixelpipe config:

My pipes

roland account

wongtanglao account

II. Photos not uploaded to flickr from Share online and pixelpipe

I seem to have found a bug in the share online/pixelpipe combo

Thee following two photos were uploaded to pixelpipe but never made it to flickr, could pixelpipe support please look into this?

1. http://pixelpipe.com/item/577a5744-56f4-4a62-bd94-9d639c9571e9
2. http://pixelpipe.com/item/f46e524c-9e0f-43d1-9c7f-c4b0449ba240

III. Suggestions for Share Online and Pixelpipe for improvement

1. implement a global upload status indicator (i.e. an icon that shows up and has two states: upload pending, and upload complete) for photos in the gallery app (which seems to be called "Photos" on the N97) like Shozu, otherwise if you take more than 30 photos in a day (which I do daily) it becomes impossible to track which photos you have uploaded and which you have not. The outbox doesn't work well.

Twice now in the last 24 hours, my N97-1 running the V11 firmware has auto-locked and subsequently pressing the keyguard aka lock switch on the right side and trying some N97 unlock voodoo from the last time this happened didn't work. I'm am going to do a hard reset and not re-install Nokia Sports Tracker and ShoZu (both of which are unofficial 5800 versions) and if it comes back, I can then definitely blame the hardware and firmware. Stay tuned!

Today was a wee day of frustration (which could be attributed probably due to the early V11 firmware or less likely the the fact that I am running the 5800 i.e. unsupported version of ShoZu) in trial N97 review land:

1. At one point, the N97 lock switch aka "keyguard" stopped working, i.e. it wouldn't unlock and the only way I could fix it was to do a *#7370# hard reset which meant I had to re-install all my apps (ShoZu, Nokia Sports Tracker, etc which was very annoying for me, imagine if a non S60 geek had to do this!)
   1. Hmmm, looks it might be fixed as follows (hat tip to The Definitive Nokia N97 Bug List):

      "Unlocking the phone via lock switch will not activate the backlight most of the time. This happens on the first unlock after an idle period – subsequent unlocks will activate the backlight until the phone goes into idle mode again. Seems to be a pretty universal problem. Extremely annoying because I have to hit the unlock switch a minimum of three times, usually more. No fix yet. Workaround: Hit the Menu Key [thanks Jasz] or Camera Key [me] to turn the backlight on before hitting the unlock key."

2. The camera app hung as shown in the photo above in the "Processing Image" state. Holding the menu key and trying to kill the camera app didn't fix it (instead the phone just showed a blank menu of apps). I had to turn the phone off and then on to make it work.

The N97 GPS lock seems to be much faster than the N82 or N95. In fact it seems to be almost as fast as the lock from the dedicated Nokia LD-4W GPS. I'll try to do some more formal measurements later but subjectively it has been impressively fast so far!