A New Lease of Life for the Nokia N97

I couldn’t wait any longer, so I did what I had to do, and now have my Nokia N97 upgraded to the latest v20 software. It’s quite amazing. It’s now as if the Nokia N97 is a new phone. The phone feels noticeably more snappy in response, the so-called C: drive has more space free (by about 8MB only), and there is kinetic scrolling just about everywhere. This is what the Nokia N97 should have been when it was launched earlier this year.

The biggest thing for me, though, was the ability to sync with my Mac. I had been previously syncing my N95 8GB via Apple’s iSync software together with a iSync plug-in supplied by Nokia. It allowed me to seamlessly sync contacts and calendars on the phone with Address Book and iCal on the Mac. This was not working with the N97, apparently because of something seriously broken with the internal N97 software. Shortly after the v20 software became available, Nokia also released the N97 iSync plug-in. For me, this is so much better than trying to sync through an intermediary like Google, not the least because it screws up the “first name” and “last name” components of my contacts.

The kinetic scrolling is really cool. It is so much more fun to navigate an interface with kinetic scrolling. This is something that I’m beginning to get addicted to, partly because I’m having so much fun with “scroll with momentum” on my Magic Mouse (it’s the same thing). I was a little upset when I did the flicking motion on my touchpad and did not see the kinetic effect. Kinetic scrolling is not just eye candy. It really makes navigating the user interface less tedious.

Some of the other improvements include more efficient memory management for applications and better battery performance. The video and still camera performance is improved too. I take lots of photos and I feel the camera operations are smoother, although perhaps the overall improvement in the OS has also helped in some way. The touchscreen driver is more responsive than before, which again lends itself to a better overall user experience.

I found the free space gained in the C: drive to be only modest. A little tip I discovered is that you can gain even more space in C: by deleting some of the not so useful applications. In fact, even if you do want some of the applications like, say, Psiloc World Traveller, you can uninstall it (freeing up space in C:), then go to Ovi Store and reinstall the application into E: (and thus not taking up space in C: anymore).

The much anticipated v20 software has lived up to much of its hyped improvements. If you have a N97 without the v20 software, you should really think about updating.

Now, the only other thing I want from Nokia is to fix the Nokia Multimedia Transfer, so that I can sync photos, videos, and music via bluetooth with iPhoto and iTunes. I’m currently making-do with syncing photos via USB cable to iPhoto, but wireless transfer will be so much more convenient.