Opened, with keyboard
We have to push the front panel from the left to start the really wonderful process as an invisible force pushes the upper panel and then it lifts and rotates it. The end result is a cool mini-computer. It really looks like you want to have a pigmy sit in front of it, saying something like “hey buddy, here’s a PC of your size, go ahead and use it”.
If we take a closer looks we can see that three plastic arms move the front, two of these being connected to a large panel. This panel can be seen from the back as well, and Nokia’s designers have placed a couple of abbreviations describing the handset’s features. Amongst these arms, at the most protected place, we can see a small cable, this carries all the information to the front panel and of course we can’t judge how long will it last, but it’s sure that it looks really sturdy. When opened, the whole phone is very stable, it doesn’t move or wobble.
From now on the device is designed to be used with two hands, the five keys that control the cursors are placed on the left (which could be strange after the keyboard of a standard PC), and it would surely be great during browsing if we had a touchpad here, but it’s still okay. The three rows of the QWERTY keyboard are not enough at all. The space key is on the side (you could get used to this), but some of the special characters cannot be inserted by using the modification keys (the equivalents of shift and alt), so for example if we’d like to type a smiley we also need to use the Sym key as well. Of course this is a Hungarian version, the international one has a different layout.
The keyboard has a uniform and cool backlight. The keys are far enough from each other and the pressure point is perfect. If we can get used to its logic we can type with quite a high efficiency and sooner or later we get to know when we should tap the screen to access a feature and when is it enough to use the keyboard. Although N97 forces the user into compromises quite a lot of times, that’s all that one could do in such a small size and the whole construction is so easy to use that I didn’t need a notebook even on a long weekend, as N97 proved to be enough for browsing the web, reading emails and writing short replies.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
