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Apple iPhone 3G S vs Nokia N97

photo-21Perhaps you’ve already heard all about it. SingTel will start selling the iPhone 3G S in Singapore on 10 July 2009 (see SingTel Shop announcement). I think this iPhone 3G S will finally be what the iPhone is meant to be. It is two years late in coming, after the iPhone 3G launched in 2008 and the original iPhone in 2007. Ignore all the Apple marketing for a moment, the iPhone 3G S now finally has all the major features that everyone has come to expect of a smartphone. That’s great, but how does it stack up against other smartphones?

Other phone manufacturers did not sit still waiting for Apple to catch up. In the two years that Apple went from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3G S, many other new smartphones have come to market. For Nokia, one of the significant milestones is the introduction of their first touchscreen smartphone, the 5800 XpressMusic. The flagship N97 followed about a half year later. Both phones run the Symbian S60 5th Edition software platform.

How does the iPhone 3G S stack up against the N97?

Physical Form: The iPhone 3G S measures 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 mm, weighs 135 gm. The N97 measures 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm, weighs 150 gm. The N97 is slimmer, but taller and thicker, and a little heavier too. The N97 is inevitably thicker and heaver as it is a side-slider design and a real built-in QWERTY keyboard. The construction is surprisingly good and solid. The iPhone is a solid block. With nothing to slide or move, no (almost) buttons to push, you’d expect it to be solid.

Phone Connectivity: Both the iPhone 3G S and N97 have all the works. Quad-band GSM, tri-band UMTS. 900 MHz UTMS replaces the 850 MHz UMTS frequency for certain N97 markets. Both phones offer 802.11b/g WLAN. The iPhone 3G S sports Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, while the N97 supports only up to Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR. Both phones support Assisted-GPS. I understand that the HSDPA function on the iPhone 3G S will support up to 7.2 Mbps download speed, which puts it ahead of the N97 which supports up to 3.6 Mbps only.

Other Sensors: Both phones feature accelerometers (orientation sensor), digital compass, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor.

User Interface: The iPhone 3G S is entirely dependent on the touchscreen interface, with virtual keypads and virtual keyboards. The user interface is quite smooth and fluid, but how good it may be, some people will find it easier to work with a real keys. The N97 is also touchscreen.

Camera Functions: The N97 wins with a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual-LED flash. The iPhone 3G S only has a 3 megapixel camera with no flash. Both phones support geo-tagging, and they both record video at VGA resolution with 30 fps. The iPhone 3G S lacks a secondary camera like the N97 to use for making video calls. I suppose video calls aren’t all that important anyway. To date, I’ve not made a video call other than for the sheer fun of seeing it work.

Battery Life: The iPhone 3G S boasts 12 hrs and 5 hrs of 2G and 3G talk times respectively, which is somewhat comparable to the N97’s 9.5 hrs and 6 hrs. In terms of standby time, the N97 wins at over 400 hrs compared with the iPhone 3G S’ 300 hrs. The N97’s video playback time is weak at 5.5 hrs compared with the iPhone 3G S’ 10 hrs, but it scores better with 40 hrs music playback compared to the other’s 30 hrs. I guess, in general, their battery performance can be said to be comparable.

Display: Both phones sport a 3.5″ display. The iPhone 3G S has a 480×320 resolution, which looses out to the N97’s 640×360 resolution. The iPHone 3G S uses a capacitive touchscreen which is more touch sensitive than the N97’s resistive touchscreen. But the N97’s resistive touchscreen technology enables you to use a stylus.

Under The Hood: Both phones have built-in 32GB of flash memory (the iPhone 3G S is also available in a smaller 16GB version). However, in most other techie data sheet specifications, the iPhone 3G S will win out: 256MB of RAM vs 128MB for the N97, 600 MHz ARM1176JZF CPU vs the 434 MHz ARM11 CPU (not sure how the CPU can be compared directly…).

The iPhone 3G S and N97 are somewhat comparable phones in overall features and capabilities. In fact, the N97 looks surprisingly like the iPhone 3G S too. The smooth, shiny surface, mostly occupied by its large display, looks quite similar to the iPhone 3G S from afar.

But the two phones are each different enough to cater to different target users. If camera photography is important to you, you will go for the N97’s better camera optics and flash light capability. No doubt the N97’s dual-LED flash is nothing spectacular compared with Xenon flashes on other camera phones, having a flash is always better than not having any at all. The higher resolution display is an advantage for viewing photos and videos.

I’ve not actually played with the iPhone 3G S, since it isn’t available yet in Singapore, but from my experience playing with the iPhone 3G, I’d say that the user interface is smooth, slick, and somewhat fun to use. The N97 interface will be familiar to any Symbian user, although it could be a little complicated to first time users.

As with all first release software, the N97’s software currently still has a few kinks that need sorting out. Hopefully we will be seeing a more responsive and stable software in future updates (which are always free). If you want the fun-ness of the Apple user experience, simple idiot-proof user interface, then go for the iPhone 3G S.

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