Nokia N97 Web browsing

The Nokia Nseries devices always impressed with their Web browsing ability, and the Nokia N97 does an admirable job, but the transition to touch hasn't added any new features, and some of our favorites are now missing. The mini map is gone, replaced by a simpler zoom slide that adds an extra couple of steps to browsing long Web pages. T-Mobile's G1 uses a touchable sort of mini map, and we wish Nokia would have gone this route. The browser rendered pages very nicely. Our own homepage looked perfect on the phone's screen. Still, both CNN and the New York Times refused to offer up their full desktop versions to our Nokia N97 review unit, and there was no way to change the way the browser describes itself (desktop vs. mobile) in the settings. Though pages loaded quickly, whether we were using the 3G HSDPA network or our own home Wi-Fi umbrella, we still wish the browser was more responsive. Flicking through pages or double-tapping to zoom in on text always produced a slight lag, and we wish these gestures would simply spring to action.

The Nokia N97 comes packed with Flash Lite 3.0, which means the phone can play videos directly from the YouTube Web page. In fact, though the phone seems to come with a dedicated YouTube app, this was only a link to the YouTube mobile page. Viewing the desktop version of YouTube in the Nokia N97's browser, we were able to play videos within the Web page itself, and the Nokia N97 did a better job handling Flash content than any other mobile phone we've seen. Pages still slowed to a halt while a video was playing, but video playback was completely watchable, if not smooth.

For GPS navigation, the Nokia N97 uses Nokia Maps. It's a nice mapping app, and it works well for turn-by-turn directions, but it clearly isn't ready for the N97's touchscreen. First of all, the globe on the opening Maps screen spins the wrong way when you touch it. Overall, the maps were not very responsive to touch input. The road headings were also clipped on the phone's screen, so that we usually didn't know if we were supposed to take a highway heading east or wes